My First Library

6 May
Monday PM

I predict by the end of the day this pen will be completely dried out. It's nice, with a micro tip and a stylish blue-black flow, but it's not really a day-to-day instrument. As writing instruments go.

Alright, I'm stalling. I want to write, I swear. But I can't collect my thoughts enough to do it. Really what I want is to continue uninterrupted this Hepburn bio (eerie and completely unexpected how much of my younger self I'm seeing in these engrossing pre-Tracy chapters of the Great Kate's life) but they're not paying me to sit around reading library books now are they. I'll bet though that I could do just that if I were working at a library. Well maybe on quiet days.

I miss quiet days. And if they call me, or send me a letter or email, or however they do it, and tell me they're definitely interested, and I passed all the library-type tests and whatnot, would they let me choose the location? Blackstone is just up the street. But I've been going there since grammar school. Since in fact the day Miss Harte (slim, short, That Girl flip) took me there to get my very first library card. Afterwards, like girlfriends, we got in her junky little Volkswagen clown car and she took me shopping and we had 3 each of Baskin-Robbins 33 flavors. Then we got our nails done.

Alright, that last part was a flat-out lie. Sorry, just kidding around. Technically it wasn't just me Miss Harte took to Blackstone library. It was almost her whole 4th grade class and I'm thinking we took a school bus to get there. We all got a tour of the place, upper and lower level, and were asked by the lady who ran the place (tall, glasses, pelican nose) what kind of stories we liked. As you can see, the library has a book for every interest. What are some of yours? Idiotically, everyone talked at once and I don't have a clue what I said. But she smiled, indulgently, and talked to us for quite a little while, long enough for me to notice Miss Harte's expertly pretty, pearl-pink nails, and after we each got our very own individual library cards with our individual names elegantly typed on them; thin, sandpaper colored things with rounded edges. Then we were encouraged to look around us and see what we might like to check out and take home. For this first trip we were allowed one book each.

It was fun at first, everybody scattering and giggling and rushing gleefully around like demented mice in a book-lined maze. Until Miss Harte, who practically never gets mad, raised her soft voice and started sharply scolding people, reminding us where we were and why we were there. I found this oversized book filled with some really ghastly pictures. That was the one I decided to check out, my very first library book, Great Disasters. On the cover was a faded picture of a huge oval-looking thing suspended above the ground, the bottom half of it engulfed in a cloud of fire.

At the circulation desk Miss Harte looked at it and then at me. Are you sure about this, she said, one eyebrow rising up. I hesitated. Why was she asking? Was it really so weird? What kind of books were the other girls checking out? I stared at the arch of her eyebrow, and the perfect nails holding  my book.

"Definitely," I said, taking it back from her. With a sense of real accomplishment, I handed over my new card to the pelican at the desk. "Thank you," I said politely.

On Jason Collins and The Embrace of White Culture

 

Dear Queerty commenter,

I'm not sure why the website flagged this reply to you. Maybe it took me too long to pull my thoughts together, type them out, and click the send button which triggered some spam sensor or other. At any rate this is what I was trying to say:

Yeah, I was kind of waiting for this.

As soon as I read Jason Collins explaining the significance of the number 98 on his jersey, I knew some tone deaf malcontent (straight or queer, and most likely Black) was going to take issue with it, objecting on the grounds of race. Collins making the decision to come out of his NBA closet is an awesome cultural, social and political moment. But it seems all you've managed to take from it is how wrong it feels for him to honor the memory of a dead White boy.

Just tell me this, please. Precisely whom of all those Black men and boys whose brutalization Collins is supposedly ignoring would you have him publicly recognize? You yourself named no one in particular and that, surely, is the point. There are too many to name (especially if we include in the tally all the Black women and girls you don't bother to acknowledge), and their deaths by gay bashing are harder to track as such because their grieving families often cloak the details, refusing to allow their slain children to be publicly identified as LGBT. Too often it is Black homophobia, and the denial it produces, that subverts proper justice for Black victims of anti-gay violence.

Matthew Shepard's 1998 torture/murder was heinous and heartless, galvanizing the grief and anger of all kinds of people--not just White and not just gay--here in the United States and around the world. It was also one of the few gay bashings that shocked mainstream press organizations out of their collective indifference, forcing them to acknowledge that LGBT lives matter--and so do our deaths. Matthew's murder, the sheer mindless cruelty of it, became a call to action, and his face and name have--with his parents' full cooperation--come to symbolize the horrifying consequences of homophobia.

This, I'm sure, is why Jason Collins selected 98. It isn't that other victims, known or unknown, don't matter; rather the nod to Matthew is meant to acknowledge all the victims of intolerance and hatred--Black Trannies, White Bisexuals, Lesbian Latinas, Asian Gays and every gender, racial and ethnic rainbow member in between--that Matthew's martyrdom represents.

I'm sorry, but I do not see how Jason's public acknowledgment of Matthew Shepard translates as an "embrace of white culture and all that comes with it." Nor, at this writing, has Collins revealed he has a boyfriend or partner, White or otherwise. But even if he does, so what? You seem to be suggesting that Black queers should stay on their side of the color line where they belong. You identify as a Black gay man--are you sure you want to say that? Would that sentiment be agreeable to you coming out of the mouth of a White person?

To your final point, if Black gay relationships are "invisible," overwhelmingly the reason for it is that too many Black men, most especially those with public profiles, persist in living DL existences.

In which case your quarrel is absolutely not with Jason Collins.

Jason Collins Has Come Out -- Why It Matters

I work in an office filled with lively, opinionated folks of various ages yet so far most have been quiet as church cathedrals on the subject of NBA player Jason Collins coming out as gay. Maybe there's conversation going on, just not in my hearing. Interesting.

There's plenty of chatter going on about Collins in cyberspace of course, including the inevitable and dismissive "Who cares?" and "Why does it even matter?" For sheer towering cluelessness, there's also a fair sprinkling of my personal favorite: "Straight people don't come out as straight, so why do gay people think they have to?"

Let's take that last bit of disingenuousness first.

I've said this before (as have many others before me), but apparently whenever someone of note comes out of the closet it bears repeating: straight people don't have to "come out" as straight because historically the culture in which we live already presumes everyone to be straight, expects them to be. Slowly, as more LGBT people make their presences felt, this becomes less the case. Even so there remains a marked tendency on the part of many people to assume that because they are heterosexual so is every single person they encounter in the course of their day.

Besides, that argument is false: straight people actually do come out, all the time, in all sorts of ways. They telegraph their heterosexuality in water cooler conversation about remembered romantic getaways with their spouse or significant other, upcoming wedding anniversaries and family celebrations. They do it by expressing affectional interest in a new acquaintance, or sexual interest in a person passing by them on the street.

As to the knee jerk "who cares" and "why does it matter" responses, well, bunk.

Of course it matters and on some level everybody cares. Maybe you're so over it, but most people are fascinated by gossip about who is or might be queer, particularly when the talk involves celebrities, especially when the talk involves male celebrities. Whether or not LGBT people should be allowed to legally marry, adopt, teach in public schools, be accorded legal protection from discrimination in housing and employment, and serve in the armed forces--or play team sports--without having to lie and hide, continue to be subjects of heated debate, here and elsewhere around the world.

In that circumstance, it's impossible to read the "who cares" retort as anything but a wish to close down any further discussion about the subject of non-heterosexuality: stop talking, I don't need to hear about this, I don't want to know. Invariably these people insist they have no problem with gay, and really don't care one way or the other. You're gay? Fine, whatever, but I don't need to know. Just shut up about it.

But that's precisely the problem. As someone eloquently posted to Facebook recently, the price of your acceptance of me should not have to be my silence. That you'd require me to be invisible as a condition for allowing me to breathe the same air as you effectively condemns me to a life on the margins, where I can never feel sure of my welcome in your house or indeed my value as a fellow human being. Silence sends me right back to the closet.

Silence also kills. Especially if, like Mr. Collins and me, you are Black.

According to recent data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Black people account for almost half of AIDS deaths in the U.S. since the epidemic's beginnings and we remain the racial/ethnic group most affected by the disease, with young Black gay men accounting for more new rates of infection than any other race/ethnic, age or gender group. Poverty, higher rates of incarceration, and lack of access to comprehensive health care are the significant factors that explain this.

But stigma--the shame and disgrace associated with homosexuality--all but ensures the spread of HIV and AIDS. The fear of revealing yourself as gay, and the unconscious conviction that you are something broken, defective, less than and your life without worth, because you are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, becomes for far too many in communities of color a barrier to seeking testing and treatment services, and life-saving prevention information.

That fear and shame discourage many Black LGBT people from coming out to their family and friends. The consequent lack of emotional support deepens feelings of isolation, anxiety, and depression that drive risky behavior.

So it turns out coming out matters. A lot. Whenever someone comes out, they confront the gossip and change the conversation about what being gay means. Instead of everyone else defining you, you define yourself. You tell people who don't know, what gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender is simply by telling them who you are. If silence breeds denial, disrespect and self-hatred, your "starting the conversation" can break down the walls misunderstanding, foster empathy and acceptance, and save lives.

This is why Jason Collins coming out matters. Because he matters.

Because we all do.

The Eternal Return

I have been reading poetry and writing poetry and dreaming poetry. Falling asleep with iambic pentameter fragments swirling around in my brain... There is an outside possibility that I am a poet.

But only an outside possibility. Nothing is certain.

I am being urged by my workshop leader to go the POD (Publish on Demand) route as a way of getting launched as an honest-to-God for-realsies author. Imagine that! Thrills me! Scares me to death!

Scares me to death, kiddies. Really does.

The temptation to say Ah, Who are you kidding?, plant myself on the sofa and lose myself in the syndicated adventures of Rob and Laura and George and Ouisie is tremendous. I've waited too long, I worry, I've nothing that noteworthy to say anyway, I brood. Who'd read me? Who'd buy me? Who'd care if I ever published or didn't? And anyway there's this great Bette Davis movie coming on and it's becoming a favorite; it's strange and atmospheric and I think I like it even better than The Letter. I've just blanked on the title but in it she plays a wretch of a witch named Stanley whose reckless willfulness ruins the lives of just about everyone in her orbit.

Stanley. Love that. And Bette makes it work.

So I could just sit back and watch that again. Or wait about ten minutes and catch The Dick Van Dyke Show.

What is it Bette was famed for saying? If you know your Bette Davis you know where I'm going with this, I'm sure.

"No guts, no glory".

Pretty sure it was Bette...

My Name Was Barbra, Too

Poor things; December since last we visited. Did you think I'd forgotten, abandoned you?

As I write I am listening to selections from Barbra Streisand's My Name Is Barbra, Two...Too? album, the sublime sequel, if that's the correct description, to her wonderful My Name Is Barbra album, which was, I think, the companion lp to the first of her storied sixties television specials--

Or actually, no, I may have the sequence slightly wrong. The black and white television special My Name Is Barbra may have been launched by the success of Streisand's record album of the same name, with the lp My Name Is Barbra Two...Too? the immediate follow-up to the TV special since it featured some of its tunes. (The Second Hand Rose medley in Bergdorf Goodmans department store.)

I was only 8 at the time of all this, understand, and the only television program I remember from that year was the Rogers and Hammerstein musical special, Cinderella, the color version starring the wide-eyed and winsome Lesley Ann Warren in the title role. If I squint I can see my skinny 8 year old self in summer culottes wandering my Aunt Mary and Uncle Larry's sprawling Blackstone Street apartment singing "A Lovely Night", channeling Lesley Ann swooning from that magical meeting with His Royal Highness, Stuart Damon.

But in just a few years it would be Streisand's "Where Is The Wonder" and "Second Hand Rose" I would be singing around the house, mine and everyone else's and I never really looked back. I loved the yearning and brass of that big, big voice.

More later. Not too much later. I promise.

Brava Meredith Baxter!! (Your Membership Kit Should Arrive Shortly)

Just watched the online Today show interview clip in which Meredith Baxter, best known as Elyse Keaton, the mom on the popular '80s sitcom Family Ties, came out to Matt Lauer. It was terrific. Watching her, and watching Lauer draw her out with such sensitivity and skill, was a genuine treat; I smiled all the way through it.

It was twice the treat, in fact, because as I was hurriedly putting myself together for work this morning I slowed to watch the shot of Lauer, standing outside the studio with Meredith Viera and Al Roker, giving the teaser for the upcoming interview with Baxter in which he hinted at her decision to share a "secret".

"Gay!" I thought immediately, then laughed at my presumption. Ah, Lorraine, you think everybody's gay. I grabbed the remote, clicked off the set, grabbed up my coat and bag, and went out the door and into my day, not giving it another thought.

Then I came home, turned on my pc, opened up my browser and--gasp!-- there was the "coming out" story on my homepage with Baxter's picture beside it!

Sweeeet!! :0)

I thought Baxter was very classy, didn't you?--forthright about her anxieties over such a public disclosure of her private life (Um, yeeeah, do celebrities really have those anymore? Did they ever?) and candid about her reasons for doing so (A looming tabloid disclosure *sigh*). She was also warmly funny relating how she'd earlier come out to her five grown kids--her eldest "smart-aleck" son cheekily told her he already knew--and her step-dad, Emmy-winning writer-producer Alan Manings ("Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In", "One Day At A Time", "Good Times", et al) who in reply to her nervous announcement that she was dating women said something along the lines of "Really? So am I!"

Baxter told Lauer that she'd also come out to her Family Ties family, Michael Gross who played husband, Steven, and the "kids", Justine Bateman, Tina Yothers and of course Michael J. Fox. (Oh yeah, and I suppose I should include Brian Bonsall, who played the adorable 1986 edition to the Keaton household, Andrew). Happily, according to Baxter, both her real and fictional families, as well as her friends, have been supportive and loving. I'm delighted for her, and for all of them.

But especially for her.

Some LGBT people may take issue with the awkward timing of Meredith Baxter's announcement--it is unfortunate that it took the threat of a tabloid "outing" to convince Baxter to acknowledge her queerness, and personally I hate the idea of anyone, famous or not, coming out under duress--but good on her for deciding to tell her life story her own way rather than leaving it to a supermarket gossip rag to do the deed.

Though I have nothing but admiration for LGBT people who come out young, especially those with public profiles--more of that, please-- in some ways I most admire late-in-life gays who finally stand up and step forward. I speak from painful experience when I say here that the longer you avoid telling what you know to be The Truth, the more convinced you can become that speaking out will be the cataclysmic end of everything, and the harder it can get ever to find the words and the courage to do it.

All that said, watching Baxter's coming out today is for me a bittersweet thing; I so wish the profile of African-American LGBTs was higher, by which I mean, existent. How much longer will we all have to wait to have the pleasure of watching similar Big Reveals from the likes of... oh, pick anybody. Seriously, go ahead--pick anyone. If we're really expected to believe, as we approach the second decade of the 21st Century, that all of today's black entertainers and persons of note--be they tv stars, movie stars, R&B, hip-hop and pop stars, athletes, journalists, politicos, reality-show divas or various and sundry other media movers and shakers--are all heterosexual, why not assume they're all gay as well? Holds about the same amount of logic.

Wait, you're saying, what about--? Yeah, I know... I know about African-American LGBT luminaries such as singer Johnny Mathis, dancer-choreographer Bill T. Jones and writers Alice Walker and Jewelle Gomez, to name a few... but more importantly I wonder how many other Americans, black or white, can say the same? Because that I'm aware, I've never known any of them to sit with a Matt Lauer, a Barbara Walters or an Oprah Winfrey on national television and talk plainly about the experience of being lesbian or gay or bisexual. (If I've missed something, speak up--I'd like nothing better than to be contradicted on this point!) And it needs to be said that far too often when the celebrated likes of James Baldwin or Bessie Smith or Lorraine Hansberry or Malcolm X are profiled for Black History Month, their non-heterosexuality is either downplayed to a footnote or airbrushed entirely out of the bio.

Which leaves me feeling... less than celebratory.

Bleh (Sunday Morning Pages)

Sunday. Sinday. Sin day.
(Sin-Day? What in heaven's name made me think of that?)

Restless today and vaguely... bleh. Went for a pleasant walk this morning--absolutely beautiful autumn day, perfect for strolling--but feel like I didn't get as much out of it as I should have somehow. Would I still be out and about if this were Hyde Park rather than Bronzeville? Possibly. All those evocative, familiar streets and beckoning bookstores and cafes, the lakefront, the parks. I miss the walkabouts of my younger days--so much restless energy. Wish I'd begun writing back then, too. Didn't know then I had it in me, I guess. Nobody knows anything when they're young. Nothing.

I should return Michael's call. He left a message requesting assistance from his "computer expert", meaning of course me, but I am not an expert at all, just a bit more comfortable with modern electronics than he, hopeless Luddite that he is. Mike reminds me of my mother in the way he just assumes I can rescue him whenever he's confronted with something he doesn't understand. It never dawns on either of them that I might be as baffled as they and not exactly eager to demonstrate that.

Why am I so irritable? It's the first of a nice little 3 day vacation (almost forgot I put down Tuesday as a vacation day, though I still have Tuesday night's workshop to attend) but I can't work up much enthusiasm about it. Maybe that's why I'm dragging my feet about calling Mike back. I don't feel like talking, and I don't feel like talking about why I don't feel like talking. Even a non-conversation with Michael, where we begin by acknowledging we need to keep it short, can run on for a solid two hours before someone's phone dies and we finally hang it up.

The writing is going... (pause)... okay. It could be better. I want it to be better. I want to write every day something good, something wonderful, not this doodling crap where I can go for pages not really saying anything. What forces combine to create a Baldwin? a (Toni) Morrison? a Dickens? an Oates? Why can't I be as prolific as any of them?

Because they're special that's why. Gifted. Touched by the Divine. I am neither special, nor gifted (though I might be touched). I am just okay. And only that when I work at it.

Okay. Pity party is over. Time to get back to working at it.