...Can't go into the pool because your gay...

A hot summer day, a swimming pool. A 2-year-old being told he can't go swimming because his dads are gay?


Will Trinkle and Juan Granados say they applied for a family membership at the Roanoke Athletic Club in Virginia, clearly listing themselves as same-sex partners with a 2-year-old son, Oliver. Will says he was encouraged to apply for a family plan by a club employee because only children on family plan memberships are allowed to use the club pool.

But Will says that just 9 days after his application was approved, a club employee called to tell him it was a mistake, that the club was revoking their membership because the state of Virginia doesn't consider Will, Juan and Oliver to be a "real" family.

Mark Lynn Ferguson is a Roanoke native, and he's outraged by this alleged discrimination against Will and Juan's family. That's why Mark started a petition on Change.org demanding that the Roanoke Athletic Club reinstate their membership and treat all families equally.

The Roanoke Athletic Club is owned by the Carilion Clinic, a company which owns and operates 150 hospitals and medical clinics in Virginia, serving over 1 million people. "If Carilion won't give unmarried couples access to a pool, how will it treat them at a hospital?" Mark asks.

Will Trinkle says that he was told by a Roanoke Athletic Club employee that "they were 'tightening policies' so no families like us would ever 'get as far' as we had." That's why Mark thinks it's so important to send Carilion's leaders a strong message right now, before policies are changed and more families face discrimination.

"Folks in Roanoke are good hearted and fair minded, so I was just horrified when I heard how Carilion treated this family," Mark says. Mark thinks that if enough people sign his petition, Carilion's leaders will see that people in Virginia and around America believe that all families deserve to be treated equally, married or unmarried, gay or straight.

Thanks for being a change-maker,
- Joe and the Change.org team
Start a petition

Kyle's Bed & Breakfast

The Amazon Trail - Dyke Caves

The Amazon Trail

Dyke Caves

My anger had nowhere to go. It was huge.  The headline that enraged me? “50 chief executives in finance saw their pay rise by an average of 20.4 percent.” Huh?

I scurried back into my dyke cave and plunged my brain into fiction.

I really dislike the term man cave. It creeps me out with images of unpleasant smells, hairy limbs and terrible hygiene. Then my sweetheart referred to “my” end of the couch as my dyke cave. Ick, was my fleeting reaction. I looked around.

Behind the couch was my special Verilux floor lamp. In front were two hassocks, the kind with storage, filled with books, maps, pens, paper cutters, scissors, rulers, book covers, newspapers, magazines, a heating pad, pet toys and brushes,  a good supply of index cards, an iPad, calculator, ear buds and ear plugs, magnifying glass, jackknife,  and more—all jumbled together.

The dog was on a pillow between us. A cat was curled up on one of the hassocks.  Mail and library books were on “my” side of the coffee table. Two favorite throws lined the back of the couch. I’m surprised there was room for my sweetheart, though it would be awful lonesome with her further than the reach of my arm. Yeah, I guess my setup could be called a cave without walls.

I need a cave. Maybe we all do. The Huffington Post went on to report, “Bonuses didn't fall nearly as much as anyone expected. And compensation at a number of major banks even approached record levels.”

Wait a minute. Did the bonus money trickle down? Did all the workers get a 20% raise or only those who were already earning half a million or more?   If there are enough funds to pay such a huge raise to the highest wage earners, why are they laying off so many employees while adding more work to those who are left?

Some of us are hoping to have enough money from Social Security to survive old age and there are plans for deep cuts. That bonus money? Maybe it’s going to the wrong people? Others are scraping by—or not—on disability payments, which also face deep cuts. Doesn’t someone who makes multiple millions in salary and then gets millions more for, maybe, increasing his (seldom her) company’s income feel kinda uncomfortable as they pump people into poverty?

Or maybe they didn’t notice all the job cuts in the financial sector—their own employees—and how they are now living high off the hog because they laid off or froze wage increases for loyal, productive, long-term employees whose paychecks wouldn’t cover the furniture in one room of a penthouse.

When I read the local paper in my tiny, cluttered dyke cave, I’m frightened by the increasing disparity between the superrich and the working stiffs. I wonder, what can I do? What can anyone do?

Occupy Wall Street has definitely had an impact. The Republican National Convention will be here in the Tampa Bay Area this August and the media turns to the local Occupy folks for information about the protests. Of course, the city of Tampa has declared certain natural protest areas to be completely out of bounds. The Republicans are claiming whole parks as their territory.  The papers are running front page stories about the strip clubs and other adult entertainment venues spiffing up for the upright, uptight conventioneers.

I simply can’t understand. Conservatives vote over and over to take away everything they can from the poor and the middle class. They vote to take less and less from the obscenely rich. They run on archaic moral platforms yet are not expected to disappoint the owners of local dens of iniquity.

Inequity, iniquity. Cave men; man caves.

I used to live in a city which greeted visitors with an enormous statue of a cave man right off the freeway. Every year there was a parade and the Cave Man Club float featured a rough-hewn cage. The “cave men” would go into the crowd with their “clubs” and, to wild cheering, grab women to drag into the cage. Huh?

I sense a direct relationship between that sort of behavior and the callousness of the modern man cave dwellers. I am so angry that the governor of Wisconsin is still in office. I am so angry that Karl Rove expects to buy the presidency with billions of dollars that are so needed elsewhere. I am so angry that the Supreme Court made that possible when it decided that corporations are people.

With the return of cave man mentality, perhaps it’s best to live simply and enjoy what we have. That may be the only insulation possible against greedy, uncaring, destructive powerfreaks. That, and our dyke caves.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2012

June 2012

Kyle's Bed & Breakfast

Kyle's Bed & Breakfast

The Amazon Trail - Thank you, President Obama

The Amazon Trail

Thank You, President Obama

         

         My week was looking like a trailer park after a tornado until the announcement came that the President of the United States supported marriage equality, also known as civil rights for gays. The day before, North Carolina had fallen into the hands of the morality pirates.  

          It had been the week that was. We were getting ready to try to sell our home, not an easy task in itself these days. Immediately, the house protested. Not only did it start having little issues here and there, but it sabotaged our efforts to fix what broke.

          The news that our president considered my sweetheart and me entitled to marry was vastly validating. It gave me hope that the people of North Carolina would see through the lies told on talk radio and FOX TV. It gave me strength to tackle our more commonplace difficulties. My sweetheart, close to hysterical laughter, listed these.

          Five HUNDRED and nine dollars to Stanley Steemer for leaving more stains on the floor than we had before they cleaned. Not to mention that cleaning the tiles did not include cleaning the grout between the tiles. That would cost hundreds more.

          A day after President Obama blessed our unions, I read that nearly three dozen congresspersons demanded that same gender weddings be included in the Democratic Party's platform. It reminded me how vilified our small Democratic party was for proposing the same thing and opposing the well-organized and very nasty homophobes of Southern Oregon back in the 1990s.

         Then came a two HUNDRED and nine dollar charge to “fix” a four-year old kitchen faucet that still imitates Niagara Falls every time we turn it on. Now the plumbing company wants us to pay another three HUNDRED to replace the fixture they didn’t fix. I began to suspect these service companies had business plans like Mitt Romney's: don't fix it, toss it and abandon the people.

          Our friend from North Carolina, who recently celebrated 25 years with her partner, wrote that after voting this week, she was so shaken that straight people presumed to vote away our rights, she had to sit in her car a long while before she could drive. Multiply her by every gay and progressive in the U.S. getting the news that the haters won, and we'd have national gridlock.

          Three HUNDRED and five dollars for an air conditioning unit we had serviced. The next week it started leaking all over our garage. Two service calls and many buckets of dripped water later and it's leaking again.  Did I mention that nothing in this house is over four years old?

          Back to the plumbing. My sweetheart, being a very competent femme, tried to fix the faucet herself. I looked at the problem and offered her my butch card. She watched repair videos. She talked to the faucet company. Our water bill crept up. She called the plumbing company and they agreed that, for what we paid them, they should redo the job for free. My sweetheart only asked that they send anyone but the initial service person, Steve. On the big day of our new appointment the doorbell rang and the man with the toolbox said, “Hi! I’m Steve!” We still don’t have a working kitchen sink, but no new bill because my sweetheart wouldn’t let him touch a thing. Including the toilet with the broken tube holder-in-place thingy.

          And then we heard that the Secret Service is broken. How could they be so careless while on assignment? We trust them with our leaders. With the President’s stand on marriage equality putting him in greater jeopardy than he already is as our first African American president and our heath care advocate, he is risking more ire from the right than any president in memory.

          When the Stanley Steemer guys came back out to clean up their mess, I mentioned that we kinda thought that for five hundred plus dollars, they might have moved the living room chairs, the lighter bookcases, maybe even the floor lamps...

The floor scrubber stuttered that if we’d asked them to move those items, they would have. I guess if we’d asked them to clean up their dirty puddles they might have done that too?

          As my sweetheart concluded: “$509 for splotchy floors; $200 for a faucet that still leaks; $305 for an AC unit the service guy broke—having the President of the United States say heck yes you should be able to marry – priceless!”

          Our snafus are nothing, however, compared to the way President Obama is now exposed. I’m worried about his safety. I hope the Secret Service and whatever other entities are responsible for protecting him have doubled up on security. The man has stuck his neck out for us big time. He deserves protectors of higher caliber than Steve the plumber and Stanley the floor scrubber.  

          Today we didn’t bother calling an electrician—my sweetheart fixed the light switch that broke. And we sent the money we would have spent on the electrician to the President’s re-election campaign.

Lee Lynch Copyright 2012

May 2012

Kyle's Bed & Breakfast