Friday, September 2, 2011
The Amazon Trail - The Butch Sewing Kit
The Amazon Trail
The Butch Sewing Kit
I don’t know about butch guys, but butch women are a mass of incongruities. I used to know a butch who drove cement trucks for a living and was a minister in her free time. You don’t just drive a cement truck, you’re out there with the boys using your rake and shovel. You don’t just preach from a pulpit, you have the delicate task of counseling the human spirit. I don’t know if she sewed, but if she did, her sewing kit might have been a lot like mine.
One of the first things my wife told me was that she doesn’t sew. She’s a good cook, she organizes our home, she’ll iron on occasion, but she never sews. That is what dry cleaners are for, is her philosophy. I, on the other hand, have always had a sewing kit. When I moved out west a friend gave me a going away gift that came in a small wicker case something like a lunch box. To this day, I use that thing as my sewing basket.
I don’t mean to give the impression that I make overalls from scratch or sewed my sweetheart’s wedding outfit. Mostly, I repair. I carry so many objects in my pockets, and manufacturers make such flimsy pockets, that I mostly patch up holes in my pant pockets. I have no patience or interest in anything beyond the basic rudiments of needle and thread.
Someone like me should probably master the sewing machine. I do own one, the simplest model I could find. Unfortunately, I was required to take a sewing class and make a skirt in junior high and was so traumatized I have never been able overcome my fear of the contraption. I use it only once a year, to make catnip mice at the winter holidays. That project always transforms me into a grouch, what with thread breaking and bobbins running out and never remembering the order in which one threads a machine. This year should go a bit better, though, as my sweetheart suggested that we purchase pre-wound bobbins. “You think there IS such a thing?” I asked. We raced right out to JoAnn Fabrics and got me a bunch.
Meanwhile, the primary purpose of my little sewing kit is to entangle threads of differing colors from various spools into rainbow jumbles. The pin cushion gets into it too, snagging errant dangles and wrapping them around the heads of pins until the whole collision of stuff is unusable.
My sewing technique is not subtle. My stitching tends to look like an elongated version of the scar on Harry Potter’s forehead. The basting stitch is my specialty. That’s the long loping suture whose purpose is to hold the fabric in place until a more attractive finish can be applied. Except that basting, in my case, is the finished product.
Thimbles are my enemies; I just cannot maneuver with one on, and needles poke through them with ease, so my fingers at times become the pincushions.
Sewing stores make me nauseous, so I use whatever threads and materials I find at garage sales, which leaves me with a basket full of ribbons and binding tape (good for catnip mouse tails), old-fashioned snaps, hooks and eyes, zippers and strips of elastic I have never known how to use; so many buttons I keep them in glass canisters and my wife decorates the house with them, having discovered they’re heavy enough to make great bookends; metal hem holder-uppers or whatever the technical term is (I don’t know to use them); safety pins (thank you, whoever invented safety pins); some kind of marker which could probably be very useful; a needle threader that I’ll probably have to start using now that cataract surgery has eliminated my very useful myopia; and dozens of tiny spools of thread, the kind you take along in your travel bag except for the trip when you tear something and really need one of the colors.
I did buy a bright shiny new-looking hem ripper, which I believe is one of the greatest inventions of all time. It’s unfortunate, but if I’m going to rip out a hem, I’m likely to do it with the heel of a sneaker while jumping from rock to rock across a creek.
I remember learning as a kid that needles were expensive and I was taught never to lose such a precious item. One didn’t waste thread for the same reason. Possibly, that’s why the most useful tool in my sewing kit, the one I have in spades, the one I turn to for 99% of my repair needs, is not needle or thread, but is the equivalent of the handy dyke’s duct tape: sticky-backed industrial strength Velcro.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
September 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
The Amazon Trail - Night Owl
The Amazon Trail - Night Owl
It all started when I wouldn’t get up on Sunday mornings to go to church. I was an energetic, nervous baby dyke, and I simply could not sit still that long with nothing to engage me. And the old guy up front was talking Latin, for pete’s sake. So, over some of my most formative years, say 10 through 13, I got in the habit of staying in bed really late on Sunday mornings until my mother finally gave up trying to unearth me.
Sleeping late on Sundays led to the complete and utter pleasure of staying up really late on Saturday nights. That became my time. Listening to the alternative radio station, watching horror movies on the $15.00 used console TV and, by high school, writing love poetry to my girlfriend and my crushes.
It didn’t take long before I was staying up Friday nights and as many other nights as I could get away with. That usually depended on when my mother got up to wake my father in his recliner, turn off the TV and make sure he went to bed. Then she’d sleep a couple more hours before discovering my light was still on. The poor woman. Riding herd on her Lynches was an unwinnable battle. I remember her warning me, “You’ll read your eyes out!”
So here I am all grown up - or so I'm told. My night still doesn't end until three or four in the morning. For most of these years I've fought myself, acting as my own insomniac mother and ordering myself to bed, then not complying. Mornings I was wont to beat myself up for starting work so late yet again and I'd tell myself I’d go to sleep earlier that very night, only to be lured by the sirens of stillness and solitude into another rendezvous with an absorbing book or a project I wanted to finish.
So sue me: nights are when my inner owl awakens and challenges my intellect. I get ideas then and work out knotty writing quandaries. I dream then, of what I might achieve given leisure and a long enough life. I read my eyes out. I delight at the 3:00 A.M. madness of the cats and try to quiet them so they don't wake my wife, sleeping all lonesome in the next room.
But there I go, beating myself up again. My sweetheart doesn't. I fear creating a rift in our relationship by abandoning her to the night, when in fact she is the one with enough insight to recognize and accept - and still love - this night-fired insomniac. Just make sure you sleep long enough to get at least seven hours, she urges. What a simple revelation: be who you are.
I work on west coast time so I don’t have to be at my desk and my job till noon. Why not answer the call of my nature, she reasons. When I force myself toward early sleep, I come wide awake next to her, wriggling and itchy and grabbing index cards or the iPod to jot notes. The early hours of the morning, the rich dark of deep night, fan the fires in me. Their light flares and I’m up again, much to the cats' delight.
It's taken most of a lifetime and a perfect match to understand this quirk of mine. My wife is teaching me what love really is as she embraces this flawed being. She’s teaching me that flaws are not flaws: they are what make us ourselves when we're not trying to conform to someone else’s agenda of normal. What makes me this way? I don't know the answer any more than I know why I'm gay or how I came to be able to put pretty words on a page or how my wife got so wise and understanding.
With August's wilding of England; America’s confusion between religion and power, people and corporations; with people drunk on hate of gays and colors; with the abandonment of wildlife to bulldozing developers - how I wish my sweetheart had a counterpart who could marry the world and steer it, also, to simply love all its parts and stop trying to quash the differences among living things that make this earth whole in its glorious self.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
August 2011
It all started when I wouldn’t get up on Sunday mornings to go to church. I was an energetic, nervous baby dyke, and I simply could not sit still that long with nothing to engage me. And the old guy up front was talking Latin, for pete’s sake. So, over some of my most formative years, say 10 through 13, I got in the habit of staying in bed really late on Sunday mornings until my mother finally gave up trying to unearth me.
Sleeping late on Sundays led to the complete and utter pleasure of staying up really late on Saturday nights. That became my time. Listening to the alternative radio station, watching horror movies on the $15.00 used console TV and, by high school, writing love poetry to my girlfriend and my crushes.
It didn’t take long before I was staying up Friday nights and as many other nights as I could get away with. That usually depended on when my mother got up to wake my father in his recliner, turn off the TV and make sure he went to bed. Then she’d sleep a couple more hours before discovering my light was still on. The poor woman. Riding herd on her Lynches was an unwinnable battle. I remember her warning me, “You’ll read your eyes out!”
So here I am all grown up - or so I'm told. My night still doesn't end until three or four in the morning. For most of these years I've fought myself, acting as my own insomniac mother and ordering myself to bed, then not complying. Mornings I was wont to beat myself up for starting work so late yet again and I'd tell myself I’d go to sleep earlier that very night, only to be lured by the sirens of stillness and solitude into another rendezvous with an absorbing book or a project I wanted to finish.
So sue me: nights are when my inner owl awakens and challenges my intellect. I get ideas then and work out knotty writing quandaries. I dream then, of what I might achieve given leisure and a long enough life. I read my eyes out. I delight at the 3:00 A.M. madness of the cats and try to quiet them so they don't wake my wife, sleeping all lonesome in the next room.
But there I go, beating myself up again. My sweetheart doesn't. I fear creating a rift in our relationship by abandoning her to the night, when in fact she is the one with enough insight to recognize and accept - and still love - this night-fired insomniac. Just make sure you sleep long enough to get at least seven hours, she urges. What a simple revelation: be who you are.
I work on west coast time so I don’t have to be at my desk and my job till noon. Why not answer the call of my nature, she reasons. When I force myself toward early sleep, I come wide awake next to her, wriggling and itchy and grabbing index cards or the iPod to jot notes. The early hours of the morning, the rich dark of deep night, fan the fires in me. Their light flares and I’m up again, much to the cats' delight.
It's taken most of a lifetime and a perfect match to understand this quirk of mine. My wife is teaching me what love really is as she embraces this flawed being. She’s teaching me that flaws are not flaws: they are what make us ourselves when we're not trying to conform to someone else’s agenda of normal. What makes me this way? I don't know the answer any more than I know why I'm gay or how I came to be able to put pretty words on a page or how my wife got so wise and understanding.
With August's wilding of England; America’s confusion between religion and power, people and corporations; with people drunk on hate of gays and colors; with the abandonment of wildlife to bulldozing developers - how I wish my sweetheart had a counterpart who could marry the world and steer it, also, to simply love all its parts and stop trying to quash the differences among living things that make this earth whole in its glorious self.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
August 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
The Amazon Trail - Beggar of Love
The Amazon Trial - Beggar of Love
The highest recommendation I can give Lee Lynch’s writing is that you will not mistake it for anyone else’s. Her voice and imagination are uniquely her own. Lynch has been out and proudly writing about it for longer than many of us have been alive. In her new novel, Beggar of Love, she creates a protagonist, Jefferson (known by her surname), so fully realised that the story seems to distill the last several decades of lesbian life.
Since The Swashbuckler (1985), Lynch has unapologetically written novels about and for dykes. As Nicola Griffith has said about ‘lesbian fiction’ (asknicola.blogspot.com), it would not be a compliment to suggest that Lynch transcends the genre; good books are not a genre. A good book can make the reader laugh, feel desire, and think, sometimes all in the same scene. Lynch does this with pithy sentences that can convey an entire relationship and more: ‘The occasional harshness that remained in Ginger’s accent grated on Jefferson, who’d been raised to sound like a class, not a location’ (p. 88). Here she describes a phenomenon this reader never had words for, but recognised instantly. Lynch is that rare US writer who knows that class—not race or sexuality—is the great American taboo. Her fiction can be relied upon to show us characters not only of different classes, pace American denial, but of different ages and racial/ethnic backgrounds—and she introduces them effortlessly, because her dyke world cuts across all those lines. This diversity is one of the things lesbian and feminist literature was supposed to deliver. Lynch delivers.
Another thing Beggar of Love does, that novelists rarely achieve, is to keep the outcome for the hero in genuine doubt until the very last page. The reader comes to know Jefferson in all her charming, sometimes infuriating butch complexity, and Lynch honors her readers’ intelligence by giving Jefferson many dimensions. In bringing these fully to life, she also does justice to her character.
Nor is gender diversity absent from Beggar of Love. Like much of Lynch’s work it celebrates butch and femme, especially butch sexuality, as more than fixed references to one point in time. There are few male characters, although there are hints that Jefferson’s father, Jarvy, sought the company of other men while married to Jefferson’s mother. Jefferson seems to have inherited her father’s roving eye, as surely as his alcoholism. Jarvy’s story brings to mind the father’s tragedy in Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s graphic (in the sense of drawn media) memoir.
What takes the reader through the years and pages of this novel is, finally, the writing. ‘She'd been in love before, of course. Angela was still like ivy entwining her heart that some day would leave impressions, fossils of love, but her sensations now moved inside those ivied walls’ (p. 85). Jefferson’s feelings, if not her experiences, are universal. ‘Now that she knew she was capable of betrayal and inflicting pain in order to have what she wanted, she suspected everyone else in the world was capable of the same thing. She'd discovered that she couldn't trust herself to honor what she'd thought she'd believed in. How could she now trust anyone else?’ (pp. 101-02)
Lee Lynch finds the words.
The highest recommendation I can give Lee Lynch’s writing is that you will not mistake it for anyone else’s. Her voice and imagination are uniquely her own. Lynch has been out and proudly writing about it for longer than many of us have been alive. In her new novel, Beggar of Love, she creates a protagonist, Jefferson (known by her surname), so fully realised that the story seems to distill the last several decades of lesbian life.
Since The Swashbuckler (1985), Lynch has unapologetically written novels about and for dykes. As Nicola Griffith has said about ‘lesbian fiction’ (asknicola.blogspot.com), it would not be a compliment to suggest that Lynch transcends the genre; good books are not a genre. A good book can make the reader laugh, feel desire, and think, sometimes all in the same scene. Lynch does this with pithy sentences that can convey an entire relationship and more: ‘The occasional harshness that remained in Ginger’s accent grated on Jefferson, who’d been raised to sound like a class, not a location’ (p. 88). Here she describes a phenomenon this reader never had words for, but recognised instantly. Lynch is that rare US writer who knows that class—not race or sexuality—is the great American taboo. Her fiction can be relied upon to show us characters not only of different classes, pace American denial, but of different ages and racial/ethnic backgrounds—and she introduces them effortlessly, because her dyke world cuts across all those lines. This diversity is one of the things lesbian and feminist literature was supposed to deliver. Lynch delivers.
Another thing Beggar of Love does, that novelists rarely achieve, is to keep the outcome for the hero in genuine doubt until the very last page. The reader comes to know Jefferson in all her charming, sometimes infuriating butch complexity, and Lynch honors her readers’ intelligence by giving Jefferson many dimensions. In bringing these fully to life, she also does justice to her character.
Nor is gender diversity absent from Beggar of Love. Like much of Lynch’s work it celebrates butch and femme, especially butch sexuality, as more than fixed references to one point in time. There are few male characters, although there are hints that Jefferson’s father, Jarvy, sought the company of other men while married to Jefferson’s mother. Jefferson seems to have inherited her father’s roving eye, as surely as his alcoholism. Jarvy’s story brings to mind the father’s tragedy in Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s graphic (in the sense of drawn media) memoir.
What takes the reader through the years and pages of this novel is, finally, the writing. ‘She'd been in love before, of course. Angela was still like ivy entwining her heart that some day would leave impressions, fossils of love, but her sensations now moved inside those ivied walls’ (p. 85). Jefferson’s feelings, if not her experiences, are universal. ‘Now that she knew she was capable of betrayal and inflicting pain in order to have what she wanted, she suspected everyone else in the world was capable of the same thing. She'd discovered that she couldn't trust herself to honor what she'd thought she'd believed in. How could she now trust anyone else?’ (pp. 101-02)
Lee Lynch finds the words.
Friday, July 8, 2011
The Amazon Trail - Oddly Hungry For More
The Amazon Trail
“Oddly Hungry For More”
A woman who has devoted her life to writing our stories, Karen Kallmaker has inspired waves of writers while gathering, like a femme pied piper, whole throngs of readers who await each of her books with anticipation of ever more delight. This year, author Karen Kallmaker was honored with the 2011 Golden Crown Literary Society’s (GCLS) Trailblazer Award. She is as beloved as her books.
This is a woman who, as a child, wanted to be Mary Poppins. Later, her super hero was Batgirl. She discovered, very young, that she couldn’t fly, and broke her arm trying. She still takes this approach to life and jumps into challenges. This style is clearly genetic, as she is a descendent of Lady Godiva. Fortunately for us, Batgirl grew up and discovered lesbian fiction in a library catalog after seeing the film “Desert Hearts” in 1986. She has not turned back since.
She was born in Sacramento, California in 1960. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, has worked in non-profit financial management and the vagaries of California law have led her to thrice marry her lucky partner of over three decades. They have two children.
Karin Kallmaker is a serious writer. Writing is who she is. She’s acutely aware that she writes not for a publisher, not for a royalty check, not for celebrity, but for her readers. Early on, Kallmaker made lesbian lives more bearable; she continues to enhance our lives by depicting us as we are. It’s not that her characters don't have issues, but that lesbians deserve happy endings.
Says friend M.J. Lowe, “Karin is honestly one of the most gracious and kind women I know. All things being equal, she genuinely does the nicer, more generous thing rather than not. It's not just diplomatic.”
I couldn't agree more. At a GCLS conference, during the dance, I emerged, dripping with sweat, into the lobby. Kallmaker didn’t say a word, but went to a table of ice and water and brought me some. Then, with breathtaking femme grace, she stepped away, giving me respectful space to be my sodden butch self. I’ve been secretly in her thrall from that moment. Another time, at the gay beach in Provincetown, a jumble of chilly lesbians huddled around a bonfire. Karin appeared out of the darkness with, what else, chocolate! And thawed the frozen lesbians with goodies and kindness.
The first day I met my sweetheart, the first meal we shared, we were with Karin and M.J. Lowe. Truly, Karin is the Queen of Lesbian Romance (as she was dubbed by “The Journal of Lesbian Studies”) in real life as well as her stories.
Karin’s first book, In Every Port, came out in 1990. She has 37 novels, collections and anthologies in print. These include her much-loved Touchwood; Goldie winners: 18th and Castro, Just Like That, and Sugar; an Ann Bannon Popular Choice winner: The Kiss That Counted; Lammy winners: In Deep Waters 2: Cruising the Strip (with Radclyffe); The Kiss That Counted, and the classic title Maybe Next Time. This year she was honored with the GCLS Trailblazer Award. She’s a four-time winner of the Lesbian Fiction Readers Choice Award. She writes romance, lesbian erotica, essays, general fiction and, under the name Laura Adams, lesbian science-fiction fantasy. Her books have been award finalists too many times to count. Karin’s work has been translated into four languages and she has dozens of short stories in various anthologies.
Karin on writing: “I really think it boils down to whether you feel you're being asked to be inauthentic to your vision - and whether you will be able to live with it later.”
“[Patricia] Cornwall, unlike others, has at least never claimed or used the lesbian community that I know of. There are others that do, and expect the adulation and kudos and community support etc., while doing nothing overt to bring our existence into a realistic mainstream setting. With some writers I fear I have a ‘yes, but what have you done for us lately’ attitude - I basically feel that if you want someone's support, you need to consistently court it. Since I write exclusively for myself and lesbian readers, I take the responsibility very seriously. My plots may not be reality, but they are (I sincerely hope) reflective of a reality any lesbian would enjoy.”
On lesbians: “I've long been of the opinion that lesbians do just about everything better. Can't help myself on that one. It's why other folks sometimes try to co-opt our community events and others get just plain envious of the support network, for example the way we've learned to create families we can't *wait* to spend Thanksgiving with. In difficult situations there are times when I *really* want to say, ‘Whatever, fool. I'm having better sex than you are.’"
“My partner and I found each other very young, and had to make it all up for ourselves, being the only two girls ever in the history of the world to fall in love, you know.”
“I think I heard the word ‘lesbian’ only once before I was having sex with one, and I didn't connect what I was doing with that word at all.”
On readers: “…my feeling is my books are to be enjoyed in whatever way the reader will most enjoy them... my goal is to leave her happy, exhausted, pleased, satisfied and yet oddly hungry for more. How she gets into that condition is her business; I'm quite pleased to be in the room when it happens.”
Can you fall (platonically) in love with a woman while writing about her? Lesbian readers everywhere have made room in our hearts for this talented trailblazer. What a poorer place our world would be without Karin Kallmaker,
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
July 2011
“Oddly Hungry For More”
A woman who has devoted her life to writing our stories, Karen Kallmaker has inspired waves of writers while gathering, like a femme pied piper, whole throngs of readers who await each of her books with anticipation of ever more delight. This year, author Karen Kallmaker was honored with the 2011 Golden Crown Literary Society’s (GCLS) Trailblazer Award. She is as beloved as her books.
This is a woman who, as a child, wanted to be Mary Poppins. Later, her super hero was Batgirl. She discovered, very young, that she couldn’t fly, and broke her arm trying. She still takes this approach to life and jumps into challenges. This style is clearly genetic, as she is a descendent of Lady Godiva. Fortunately for us, Batgirl grew up and discovered lesbian fiction in a library catalog after seeing the film “Desert Hearts” in 1986. She has not turned back since.
She was born in Sacramento, California in 1960. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, has worked in non-profit financial management and the vagaries of California law have led her to thrice marry her lucky partner of over three decades. They have two children.
Karin Kallmaker is a serious writer. Writing is who she is. She’s acutely aware that she writes not for a publisher, not for a royalty check, not for celebrity, but for her readers. Early on, Kallmaker made lesbian lives more bearable; she continues to enhance our lives by depicting us as we are. It’s not that her characters don't have issues, but that lesbians deserve happy endings.
Says friend M.J. Lowe, “Karin is honestly one of the most gracious and kind women I know. All things being equal, she genuinely does the nicer, more generous thing rather than not. It's not just diplomatic.”
I couldn't agree more. At a GCLS conference, during the dance, I emerged, dripping with sweat, into the lobby. Kallmaker didn’t say a word, but went to a table of ice and water and brought me some. Then, with breathtaking femme grace, she stepped away, giving me respectful space to be my sodden butch self. I’ve been secretly in her thrall from that moment. Another time, at the gay beach in Provincetown, a jumble of chilly lesbians huddled around a bonfire. Karin appeared out of the darkness with, what else, chocolate! And thawed the frozen lesbians with goodies and kindness.
The first day I met my sweetheart, the first meal we shared, we were with Karin and M.J. Lowe. Truly, Karin is the Queen of Lesbian Romance (as she was dubbed by “The Journal of Lesbian Studies”) in real life as well as her stories.
Karin’s first book, In Every Port, came out in 1990. She has 37 novels, collections and anthologies in print. These include her much-loved Touchwood; Goldie winners: 18th and Castro, Just Like That, and Sugar; an Ann Bannon Popular Choice winner: The Kiss That Counted; Lammy winners: In Deep Waters 2: Cruising the Strip (with Radclyffe); The Kiss That Counted, and the classic title Maybe Next Time. This year she was honored with the GCLS Trailblazer Award. She’s a four-time winner of the Lesbian Fiction Readers Choice Award. She writes romance, lesbian erotica, essays, general fiction and, under the name Laura Adams, lesbian science-fiction fantasy. Her books have been award finalists too many times to count. Karin’s work has been translated into four languages and she has dozens of short stories in various anthologies.
Karin on writing: “I really think it boils down to whether you feel you're being asked to be inauthentic to your vision - and whether you will be able to live with it later.”
“[Patricia] Cornwall, unlike others, has at least never claimed or used the lesbian community that I know of. There are others that do, and expect the adulation and kudos and community support etc., while doing nothing overt to bring our existence into a realistic mainstream setting. With some writers I fear I have a ‘yes, but what have you done for us lately’ attitude - I basically feel that if you want someone's support, you need to consistently court it. Since I write exclusively for myself and lesbian readers, I take the responsibility very seriously. My plots may not be reality, but they are (I sincerely hope) reflective of a reality any lesbian would enjoy.”
On lesbians: “I've long been of the opinion that lesbians do just about everything better. Can't help myself on that one. It's why other folks sometimes try to co-opt our community events and others get just plain envious of the support network, for example the way we've learned to create families we can't *wait* to spend Thanksgiving with. In difficult situations there are times when I *really* want to say, ‘Whatever, fool. I'm having better sex than you are.’"
“My partner and I found each other very young, and had to make it all up for ourselves, being the only two girls ever in the history of the world to fall in love, you know.”
“I think I heard the word ‘lesbian’ only once before I was having sex with one, and I didn't connect what I was doing with that word at all.”
On readers: “…my feeling is my books are to be enjoyed in whatever way the reader will most enjoy them... my goal is to leave her happy, exhausted, pleased, satisfied and yet oddly hungry for more. How she gets into that condition is her business; I'm quite pleased to be in the room when it happens.”
Can you fall (platonically) in love with a woman while writing about her? Lesbian readers everywhere have made room in our hearts for this talented trailblazer. What a poorer place our world would be without Karin Kallmaker,
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
July 2011
Saturday, June 4, 2011
The Amazon Trail - Gay Gumption
The Amazon Trail
Gay Gumption
I thought it was all about the wedding, but boy, was I wrong. As they say, a wedding is tying the knot. You sign papers, make public vows, and accept the support of friends and family. You also tell your spouse that this is forever. And ever. And ever.
Once upon a time, there was nothing to signify a gay joining but a bedroom and an overstuffed VW hauling furniture, the stereo and a cat in a carrier. All too often, a few months or years went by and the VW would head off in another direction, plus or minus a cat. But that didn’t always happen. You just didn’t hear much about the knots that stayed tied.
Recently, my sweetheart and I were invited to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of a couple who didn’t have the advantage of a formal knot-tying ceremony. They fell in love in high school and had nothing but their love to keep them together. It couldn’t have been easy. Certainly my early relationships succumbed to the wrath of the closet, which could scar one with a habit of easy dishonesty, especially within oneself. If you’re not honest with yourself, how can you be with your partner? You end up stumbling around inside a house with no foundation, in a maze of lies and denial that make it impossible to sustain a relationship.
These days, I know of so many couples who stayed together till death did them part, and I know more who have hit the 25 mark, the 35 mark, 40 years and beyond. By the time I was 40, I’d learned how to stay, but back in my twenties and thirties, I only knew how to unravel the rope, never mind tie a lasting knot. And even at 40, I didn’t know enough to make good choices. That took another 20 years. How did these long-lasting couples who’ve come out since Stonewall know who to choose and how to make it work?
Our 25th anniversary friends had no guides. Those of us who came before sure didn’t set a good example. I think this couple must have had gumption, hard-headed determination and respect for themselves, for each other and for their non-anointed marriage.
Not that we didn’t have gumption before 1969. We had it all right, but most of us used it all up fighting the wrong fights. We fought ourselves because we’d been told we were demons. We had trouble respecting our unions. How could I think well of my partner if she chose a demon like me? How could I trust a relationship between demons? How could I even want it, much less confidently promise forever? It was always easier to get in the weighted down VW and move on than to face my own demons.
Then, suddenly, the Stonewall riots, which scared me because I believed that shining a light on gay people was dangerous. Those rioters flipped on the whole circuit breaker. Closets melted in the heat of the lights. A glimmer of self-respect shone into our souls. At the same time, teenagers in small town America were falling in love and looking at the marching gay people on T.V. and understanding they were not the only ones, that they were not demons, that they were people of great value.
It still wasn’t easy for our friends, because they loved in a world that continued to demonize people like them. It was dangerous outside each other’s arms, but they didn’t drown their fears in liquor, or sabotage their tie by moving away. They never found gay books until 2003, but they played sports and got good jobs and stayed together and saved money and bought a home with a good foundation. For their first dozen years they were so closeted they had no gay friends. Finally, a friend at work came out to them and they had another couple who could share the special moments in their lives. They announced at the celebration that they made it this long partly because of that friendship.
My sweetheart and I drove 25 hours round trip to witness their accomplishment. Relatively new ourselves, it was important. In the large convivial room there was a glow of accomplishment. The couples’ two families were there as were work friends and team buddies. I imagined, afterward, the heart-rending moments of rejection and eventual acceptance that made this day possible. This couple, whose gumption surely must have wavered now and then, gifted all of us by bringing us together to toast their example and their achievement.
See, their smiles seemed to say, there’s no demons in this room. Not in us, not in you. They can’t untie this knot.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
6/11
Gay Gumption
I thought it was all about the wedding, but boy, was I wrong. As they say, a wedding is tying the knot. You sign papers, make public vows, and accept the support of friends and family. You also tell your spouse that this is forever. And ever. And ever.
Once upon a time, there was nothing to signify a gay joining but a bedroom and an overstuffed VW hauling furniture, the stereo and a cat in a carrier. All too often, a few months or years went by and the VW would head off in another direction, plus or minus a cat. But that didn’t always happen. You just didn’t hear much about the knots that stayed tied.
Recently, my sweetheart and I were invited to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of a couple who didn’t have the advantage of a formal knot-tying ceremony. They fell in love in high school and had nothing but their love to keep them together. It couldn’t have been easy. Certainly my early relationships succumbed to the wrath of the closet, which could scar one with a habit of easy dishonesty, especially within oneself. If you’re not honest with yourself, how can you be with your partner? You end up stumbling around inside a house with no foundation, in a maze of lies and denial that make it impossible to sustain a relationship.
These days, I know of so many couples who stayed together till death did them part, and I know more who have hit the 25 mark, the 35 mark, 40 years and beyond. By the time I was 40, I’d learned how to stay, but back in my twenties and thirties, I only knew how to unravel the rope, never mind tie a lasting knot. And even at 40, I didn’t know enough to make good choices. That took another 20 years. How did these long-lasting couples who’ve come out since Stonewall know who to choose and how to make it work?
Our 25th anniversary friends had no guides. Those of us who came before sure didn’t set a good example. I think this couple must have had gumption, hard-headed determination and respect for themselves, for each other and for their non-anointed marriage.
Not that we didn’t have gumption before 1969. We had it all right, but most of us used it all up fighting the wrong fights. We fought ourselves because we’d been told we were demons. We had trouble respecting our unions. How could I think well of my partner if she chose a demon like me? How could I trust a relationship between demons? How could I even want it, much less confidently promise forever? It was always easier to get in the weighted down VW and move on than to face my own demons.
Then, suddenly, the Stonewall riots, which scared me because I believed that shining a light on gay people was dangerous. Those rioters flipped on the whole circuit breaker. Closets melted in the heat of the lights. A glimmer of self-respect shone into our souls. At the same time, teenagers in small town America were falling in love and looking at the marching gay people on T.V. and understanding they were not the only ones, that they were not demons, that they were people of great value.
It still wasn’t easy for our friends, because they loved in a world that continued to demonize people like them. It was dangerous outside each other’s arms, but they didn’t drown their fears in liquor, or sabotage their tie by moving away. They never found gay books until 2003, but they played sports and got good jobs and stayed together and saved money and bought a home with a good foundation. For their first dozen years they were so closeted they had no gay friends. Finally, a friend at work came out to them and they had another couple who could share the special moments in their lives. They announced at the celebration that they made it this long partly because of that friendship.
My sweetheart and I drove 25 hours round trip to witness their accomplishment. Relatively new ourselves, it was important. In the large convivial room there was a glow of accomplishment. The couples’ two families were there as were work friends and team buddies. I imagined, afterward, the heart-rending moments of rejection and eventual acceptance that made this day possible. This couple, whose gumption surely must have wavered now and then, gifted all of us by bringing us together to toast their example and their achievement.
See, their smiles seemed to say, there’s no demons in this room. Not in us, not in you. They can’t untie this knot.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
6/11
Friday, May 13, 2011
The Amazon Trail - Me and Mr. Astaire
Me and Mr. Astaire
At age fourteen, I got an English Racer for my junior high school graduation. Seven months later, I came out. The timing was great.
I named my bike Mr. Astaire. Lightweight, nimble, quick, Mr. Astaire was a handsome blue and decidedly debonair. I kept him tuned up and shiny. Saturdays, my father would put him in the backseat of our 1950s Hudson, and drive from Queens out to Locust Valley on Long Island where Grandma and Grandpa Lynch lived. I loved the smell of his thin tire next to my face and held onto his spokes. Instead of hanging around Grandma’s house, so bored I’d read their “Saturday Evening Posts” and “Readers Digests,” I was out of there.
By the next February, Suzy and I found that there was a lot more to explore in life than geography. We’d met midway through seventh grade and become best friends. We lived a long walk or two bus rides away from each other, so we usually got together downtown and went off on our adventures from there. That was before we wanted privacy.
My legs got strong from biking up hills. My arms got strong from lifting Mr. Astaire up the stairs to Suzy’s apartment. In spring, especially, I reveled in the rides back and forth to Suzy’s under the blossoming trees, across carpets of pink petals. In summer the dogwoods blossomed white. I’d whiz down the hill at 147th Street, then turn into the side streets of single family homes. Or I’d ride through corridors of six-story apartment buildings, past church and synagogue, school and blocks of stores.
They weren’t just about young love, these journeys. For so many years I’d escaped from reality through the sedentary joy of books. I loved to run, but could only do that for so long. I loved to walk, but, somehow, telling a hovering mother you were going out for a long walk didn’t pass muster. Going for a bike ride, though – there was no arguing that. It was a time-tested, acceptable activity. It evoked a Norman Rockwell innocence and turned urban danger into bucolic pastime.
I’d meet Suzy at the park and we’d take the less populated paths so we could hold hands or just be together, she walking her Collie, me wheeling Mr. Astaire. Sure, I still explored neighborhoods and stopped to write descriptions of falling leaves or drifted snow. Sometimes, I’d lock up my bike and drink egg creams with Suzy at the soda fountain near her house. Mostly, I didn’t go out to Locust Valley anymore, but stayed in the city so I could be with my lover and learn to be a lesbian.
Suzy’s family tried the West Coast for a year. My parents had forbidden me to see her by then, so I’d bike to a faraway pay phone, having turned my two-dollar allowance into coins, and call her in California. When her family returned, they moved way out to Kew Gardens. The bike ride was long, past Queens College, on busy, pot-holed main roads and over the packed Long Island Expressway. It was scary.
Mr. Astaire went to college with me, Suzy left behind. Eventually he was stolen and replaced with Ganymede. Bicycling wasn’t big back then so I never did have a riding companion. Lovers were usually on campus. Or they were so remote that trains and busses were needed. Later, my little VW bug ferried me to trysts or we’d just move in together. I never had enough stuff to need a U-Haul until I was well into my thirties. Just my bike and many boxes of books, work clothes, favorite mugs, posters and LPs stuffed into the VW.
When Ganymede fell apart I replaced him with a Raleigh Humber that I had for almost 40 years. I’d take off from work just to spend the day wheeling around neighborhoods with Virginia Woolf, the Raleigh’s name. I’d purchased her while living in a lesbian-feminist collective and had long ago shed male heroes.
I hadn’t ridden Virginia Woolf in many years when I left Oregon to join my bride-to-be in Florida. I was looking forward to biking in new territory. The movers, though, misjudged the size of the van and my collection of books and garage sale furnishings. There was no room for my bike. They were towing my car, which they’d filled to the gills with boxes. My sweetheart and I had rented a van to drive cross country, but we had four cats, a dog, supplies for us all and my most fragile belongings stowed in it.
My sweetheart is right here with me, my wife now. Finally, there’s no need to travel across town. There’s no need to escape. It turns out I enjoy exploring more with her than on my own. It was time to let go of my romance with wandering wheels.
Lee Lynch Copyright 2011
5/11
At age fourteen, I got an English Racer for my junior high school graduation. Seven months later, I came out. The timing was great.
I named my bike Mr. Astaire. Lightweight, nimble, quick, Mr. Astaire was a handsome blue and decidedly debonair. I kept him tuned up and shiny. Saturdays, my father would put him in the backseat of our 1950s Hudson, and drive from Queens out to Locust Valley on Long Island where Grandma and Grandpa Lynch lived. I loved the smell of his thin tire next to my face and held onto his spokes. Instead of hanging around Grandma’s house, so bored I’d read their “Saturday Evening Posts” and “Readers Digests,” I was out of there.
By the next February, Suzy and I found that there was a lot more to explore in life than geography. We’d met midway through seventh grade and become best friends. We lived a long walk or two bus rides away from each other, so we usually got together downtown and went off on our adventures from there. That was before we wanted privacy.
My legs got strong from biking up hills. My arms got strong from lifting Mr. Astaire up the stairs to Suzy’s apartment. In spring, especially, I reveled in the rides back and forth to Suzy’s under the blossoming trees, across carpets of pink petals. In summer the dogwoods blossomed white. I’d whiz down the hill at 147th Street, then turn into the side streets of single family homes. Or I’d ride through corridors of six-story apartment buildings, past church and synagogue, school and blocks of stores.
They weren’t just about young love, these journeys. For so many years I’d escaped from reality through the sedentary joy of books. I loved to run, but could only do that for so long. I loved to walk, but, somehow, telling a hovering mother you were going out for a long walk didn’t pass muster. Going for a bike ride, though – there was no arguing that. It was a time-tested, acceptable activity. It evoked a Norman Rockwell innocence and turned urban danger into bucolic pastime.
I’d meet Suzy at the park and we’d take the less populated paths so we could hold hands or just be together, she walking her Collie, me wheeling Mr. Astaire. Sure, I still explored neighborhoods and stopped to write descriptions of falling leaves or drifted snow. Sometimes, I’d lock up my bike and drink egg creams with Suzy at the soda fountain near her house. Mostly, I didn’t go out to Locust Valley anymore, but stayed in the city so I could be with my lover and learn to be a lesbian.
Suzy’s family tried the West Coast for a year. My parents had forbidden me to see her by then, so I’d bike to a faraway pay phone, having turned my two-dollar allowance into coins, and call her in California. When her family returned, they moved way out to Kew Gardens. The bike ride was long, past Queens College, on busy, pot-holed main roads and over the packed Long Island Expressway. It was scary.
Mr. Astaire went to college with me, Suzy left behind. Eventually he was stolen and replaced with Ganymede. Bicycling wasn’t big back then so I never did have a riding companion. Lovers were usually on campus. Or they were so remote that trains and busses were needed. Later, my little VW bug ferried me to trysts or we’d just move in together. I never had enough stuff to need a U-Haul until I was well into my thirties. Just my bike and many boxes of books, work clothes, favorite mugs, posters and LPs stuffed into the VW.
When Ganymede fell apart I replaced him with a Raleigh Humber that I had for almost 40 years. I’d take off from work just to spend the day wheeling around neighborhoods with Virginia Woolf, the Raleigh’s name. I’d purchased her while living in a lesbian-feminist collective and had long ago shed male heroes.
I hadn’t ridden Virginia Woolf in many years when I left Oregon to join my bride-to-be in Florida. I was looking forward to biking in new territory. The movers, though, misjudged the size of the van and my collection of books and garage sale furnishings. There was no room for my bike. They were towing my car, which they’d filled to the gills with boxes. My sweetheart and I had rented a van to drive cross country, but we had four cats, a dog, supplies for us all and my most fragile belongings stowed in it.
My sweetheart is right here with me, my wife now. Finally, there’s no need to travel across town. There’s no need to escape. It turns out I enjoy exploring more with her than on my own. It was time to let go of my romance with wandering wheels.
Lee Lynch Copyright 2011
5/11
Saturday, April 2, 2011
The Amazon Trail - Choosing an Effing Cell Phone
The Amazon Trail
Choosing an Effing Cell Phone
Hoo boy, all I want to do is get a new cell phone. Our contract is up and our old phones keep their battery charges about as long as a gay bartender gets to stand still. For a week now, instead of disassembling the patriarchy or doing something equally useful, I have spent my evenings researching this little purchase.
What I really want is to sign on with CREDO, which donates to progressive causes. I was with them for years, but when I went all-cell-all-the-time, they didn’t have coverage for my area. Now they do. It’s too late, though, as everyone I know is on Verizon, which means no charges for talk time. Verizon is said to be the undisputed king of coverage, another factor I deem important. It’s unfortunate that for Verizon customers not in the market for a smartphone, the pickings are sparse.
Is choosing a phone this hard for everyone? In the recent olden days, I’d get a free Nokia and be thrilled. Verizon doesn’t even carry Nokias anymore, although I’ve read they are the most reliable phones. Hmmm – connection there? Last time we got the very adequate Samsung Alias. A friend has the Alias 2 and loves it. Samsung has replaced it with the Zeal.
The names they give phones are unreal. Well, except for the Samsung Reality. But, no, really, the Fascinate? Intensity? Octane? Gravity, Citrus, Flipout, Charm? Who exactly would buy a phone because it’s called Eternity? Maybe it’s got a speed dial to someone’s Galaxy?
Here’s what I want in a phone. First, no required data pak! I’d rather send the $30.00 a month to Credo to help fight the Defense of Marriage Act. Second, a QWERTY keyboard; texting has become the communication mode of choice for enough people that I, gritting my teeth, have begun to text. Unless a phone has a cute little slide-out, touch screen or dual-hinges, texting is an onerous task.
But why pay to, essentially, e-mail someone? One answer is that not everyone is wired into a computer, smart phone or tablet 24/7. Or maybe I jst lke the txtng language, with its short-cuts and appealing, Twitter-like brevity.
I texted my niece, an enthusiast of the medium, and asked what kind of phone she has. I expected her, as a Gen Xer, to be somewhat of an expert. “I forget,” she tapped back. How could someone forget? I study major purchases like a little boy with baseball stats. I may never forget the specs for the Kin Two “m” which started as a smart phone and has been downgraded to a feature phone – with benefits, like Wi-Fi.
I posted a friend at work, also a Gen Xer. “I have an LG with a keyboard,” she e-mailed back. OK, maybe, I thought, her husband picked out her phone. She said she really liked it, so I was interested enough to send her a list of LG feature phones to see if any sounded familiar. “It just says LG,” she replied. Maybe I should ask a Millennial, like Wonderboi, but I’m pretty sure Millennials all have iPhones.
My third, and final, requirement for this new baby, is that it doesn’t call people from my pocket. I stash so many objects in there that the phone keys have to be covered. My sweetheart carries her phone in a back pocket or else leaves it lying around the house never to be found again, but it never calls me by mistake.
I’d be concerned about battery strength if it wasn’t a lost cause. It'd be logical that strong, clear sound would be a priority for telecommunications manufacturers. It’s not, but you can’t get that kind of information from reading the company web sites. You have to wade through consumer reviews that rave or rant or curse or ramble. If I’m lucky, I get a pretty rounded picture of the pros and cons of a specific phone. Sometimes the reviews warn me off, sometimes they give me both a problem and a fix, but mostly, they just confuse me. Techie reviews are even worse. There is much tossing around of undecipherable concepts like dumb phones, sim cards, removable memory, GSM and jailbreaking.
Next to an iPhone, the gadget I most admire is the Samsung Convoy, a ruggedized phone built to military specifications and oh so butch. Apparently butches don’t text as it has no usable keyboard. I’m stuck with a scrap pile of poorly reviewed devices that Verizon offers in an obvious ploy to force customers to choose smart phones and pay higher monthly fees.
Maybe it’s time to build a better mousetrap. A rugged little machine with fabulous voice clarity and easy texting that we could dub the Gayphone. It would come in lavender or lavender camouflage and the default ringtone would, of course, be Lady GaGa’s “Born This Way.”
Prfts wd go 2 gay orgs.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
Choosing an Effing Cell Phone
Hoo boy, all I want to do is get a new cell phone. Our contract is up and our old phones keep their battery charges about as long as a gay bartender gets to stand still. For a week now, instead of disassembling the patriarchy or doing something equally useful, I have spent my evenings researching this little purchase.
What I really want is to sign on with CREDO, which donates to progressive causes. I was with them for years, but when I went all-cell-all-the-time, they didn’t have coverage for my area. Now they do. It’s too late, though, as everyone I know is on Verizon, which means no charges for talk time. Verizon is said to be the undisputed king of coverage, another factor I deem important. It’s unfortunate that for Verizon customers not in the market for a smartphone, the pickings are sparse.
Is choosing a phone this hard for everyone? In the recent olden days, I’d get a free Nokia and be thrilled. Verizon doesn’t even carry Nokias anymore, although I’ve read they are the most reliable phones. Hmmm – connection there? Last time we got the very adequate Samsung Alias. A friend has the Alias 2 and loves it. Samsung has replaced it with the Zeal.
The names they give phones are unreal. Well, except for the Samsung Reality. But, no, really, the Fascinate? Intensity? Octane? Gravity, Citrus, Flipout, Charm? Who exactly would buy a phone because it’s called Eternity? Maybe it’s got a speed dial to someone’s Galaxy?
Here’s what I want in a phone. First, no required data pak! I’d rather send the $30.00 a month to Credo to help fight the Defense of Marriage Act. Second, a QWERTY keyboard; texting has become the communication mode of choice for enough people that I, gritting my teeth, have begun to text. Unless a phone has a cute little slide-out, touch screen or dual-hinges, texting is an onerous task.
But why pay to, essentially, e-mail someone? One answer is that not everyone is wired into a computer, smart phone or tablet 24/7. Or maybe I jst lke the txtng language, with its short-cuts and appealing, Twitter-like brevity.
I texted my niece, an enthusiast of the medium, and asked what kind of phone she has. I expected her, as a Gen Xer, to be somewhat of an expert. “I forget,” she tapped back. How could someone forget? I study major purchases like a little boy with baseball stats. I may never forget the specs for the Kin Two “m” which started as a smart phone and has been downgraded to a feature phone – with benefits, like Wi-Fi.
I posted a friend at work, also a Gen Xer. “I have an LG with a keyboard,” she e-mailed back. OK, maybe, I thought, her husband picked out her phone. She said she really liked it, so I was interested enough to send her a list of LG feature phones to see if any sounded familiar. “It just says LG,” she replied. Maybe I should ask a Millennial, like Wonderboi, but I’m pretty sure Millennials all have iPhones.
My third, and final, requirement for this new baby, is that it doesn’t call people from my pocket. I stash so many objects in there that the phone keys have to be covered. My sweetheart carries her phone in a back pocket or else leaves it lying around the house never to be found again, but it never calls me by mistake.
I’d be concerned about battery strength if it wasn’t a lost cause. It'd be logical that strong, clear sound would be a priority for telecommunications manufacturers. It’s not, but you can’t get that kind of information from reading the company web sites. You have to wade through consumer reviews that rave or rant or curse or ramble. If I’m lucky, I get a pretty rounded picture of the pros and cons of a specific phone. Sometimes the reviews warn me off, sometimes they give me both a problem and a fix, but mostly, they just confuse me. Techie reviews are even worse. There is much tossing around of undecipherable concepts like dumb phones, sim cards, removable memory, GSM and jailbreaking.
Next to an iPhone, the gadget I most admire is the Samsung Convoy, a ruggedized phone built to military specifications and oh so butch. Apparently butches don’t text as it has no usable keyboard. I’m stuck with a scrap pile of poorly reviewed devices that Verizon offers in an obvious ploy to force customers to choose smart phones and pay higher monthly fees.
Maybe it’s time to build a better mousetrap. A rugged little machine with fabulous voice clarity and easy texting that we could dub the Gayphone. It would come in lavender or lavender camouflage and the default ringtone would, of course, be Lady GaGa’s “Born This Way.”
Prfts wd go 2 gay orgs.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
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