To Incarnate As A Woman

 

My ‘big sister’ cousin in Bangkok made this avatar for me. She chose the photo. The one that reminded her of my father. The one I posted to show the butch side of myself. The male persona that telegraphed itself from a previous life into my rebirth as a woman in this life. For clearly my karma as a man in that previous life needed a new perspective. I may have been a womanizer, a man of power. An abuser of such power as a man with many wives as one (American) psychic channeled it. I was a young feminist angry at male privilege when I received this news. It struck me as a cosmic comeuppance. It gave me more compassion for men, but made me no less of a feminist.

The cosmic joke of reincarnation is that we are all "born in the wrong body". Over and over again for the sake of experiencing separateness and a different perspective with each rebirth. For that is the human condition. To compress the entire gloriousness of the soul into this animal existence of biological human form. It is the seat of our existence to experience this dissatisfaction and if we do not see it at first we will in sickness, old age and death.

To incarnate as a woman is to be gifted a relationship so closely tied to the body that it feels like an assault. An assault of messiness, drippiness, blood red so visible we must learn to hide it as part of our suffering, our coming of age. And what about birth that ultimate messiness? Or as my American teacher of womanhood told me “The woman is the one whose body is turned inside out in pregnancy and birth. The woman is the one who faces her own death. And she breast-feeds. She feeds the baby out of her own body. She feeds the baby her own blood turned into milk. It is the woman who is forever changed in that physical metamorphosis. And it is so utterly completely and totally difficult.”

I am gifted in this life to love women as a woman. To serve and empathize with women. To luxuriate in their bodies, their carnal sacredness and beauty. To receive their love in my earthly body of female knowledge. I am gifted in this life to bridge two cultures (three if you're counting) so that I may better see all that an incarnation has to offer in human society. I rejoice in being reincarnated yet again. To once more arrive in a new body in an unfamiliar life so that I may be reborn into new knowledge as I spend this incarnation getting to know it so very intimately as my own life experience. 

I offer you this message of incarnation in a familiar form from American culture.

"Goddess grant me the serenity to accept the biology of my sex, the color of my skin, the circumstances of my birth. The courage to be proud of who I am, who I have become and can become. And the wisdom to know it is all a journey. A karmic ride."

Happy Pride Y’all.

Occupy Marriage

My partner Catherine asked me to marry her the day of gay pride, three days after the ruling came down allowing the quest for marriage equality to proceed. I said yes, but after so many years of being against marriage as an institution I have to write myself a 3,000 word attitude adjustment.

What Cost Marriage Equality?

The gay and lesbian community won a huge victory this week. With no help from me. (Unless you count being publicly open about being in a long term relationship with the woman I love.) When it became clear a decade or more ago that the gay community was going to run with the marriage equality issue I looked upon it much as I did the issue of gays in the military. That this was a niche issue relevant to the few rather than the many and I decamped. I no longer called myself a gay activist. (I became a climate change activist.)

In the late '80s I chose the political identity of lesbian over bisexual because I realized that the straight people I worked with and came out to needed an unambiguous identity in order to address their questions to me about being gay. (The idea that everyone had a fluid sexuality, I quickly realized was too difficult to explain.) As a gay activist I lived the phrase made popular by the feminists of the '70s that the personal was political. And  in the '90s I wrote about my lesbian household as a columnist in the relatively conservative arena of a weekly newspaper in Palo Alto. 

My last point of contact as an activist for the gay community was as a panelist going into high schools (including my own) to talk about the trials of being a lonely, frightened gay kid whose future seemed severely curtailed. The reactions of parents to my appearance began with "I get it about the gay kids, but why does my kid have to be exposed to that lifestyle". Umm, no not getting it at all. Who, after all, was likely to do the bullying?

I often spoke alongside speakers from PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbian and Gays). This group was of immense emotional support to the gay community in the days when parents were just as likely to disown their gay children. The emotional outpouring as PFLAG marched in the Gay Liberation parades of the '70s onward did much to heal this wound. The support offered to parents was equally important. When kids came out to parents, parents typically went into the closet tearfully grieving what was essentially the death of a heterosexual child.

With the fight for gay marriage, the issue polarized the nation much like the abortion issue continues to do so. We made the Christian Right stronger by giving them a unifying enemy. Christian leaders admitted that homophobia and the fear of homosexuals brought more money into their fundraising campaigns than any other issue and they continued to write those letters perpetuating the hatred. And the hate trickled down and was made personal in the dialogues of families of the Christian right and into the schools where they already had a foothold on school boards. The fear of gay marriage was translated directly into the fear that children as young as six would be forced to learn about homosexuality in school. (This was a gross misinterpretation. In actuality it would only be in the sex ed classes that homosexuality would be mentioned at all and only in passing as an acceptable condition.)

At the height of this power of the Christian Right it became popular among the teens of those families to be a "hater". It was something to be proud of. I saw in their ranks, t-shirts that said "I (heart) haters". And because of this turf war being waged in our schools I believe that the fight for gay marriage had a direct correlation with the increase in bullying and the rise in numbers of suicides among our most vulnerable population. A population very hard to help because they were under the age of consent and the fear of being labeled a child molester kept the gay community from reaching out to these teens.

When I came out in high school it was difficult to consider a gay identity when it was an emerging movement in the public eye, but it did not feel nearly as dire as what gay and questioning kids were reporting from their lives in the '90s going forward. I make this conclusion because the generation before me had a different experience than I did. The idea of a gay identity was so exotic in the '50s that there was no need to consider it at such a young age. The '50s being a time of chivalry and protection of those smaller and weaker than ourselves, those who were stronger protected the weaker as a point of honor. The bigger boys took under their wing their weaker (more effeminate) counterparts. And the message to the bullies was that bullying was for the weak of heart and the insecure. 

Once out of high school, of course, it was a different thing altogether and those who found themselves in the gay lifestyle would have to fight the good fight that we came to know as the gay liberation movement. Meanwhile for those under the age of consent, the more homosexuality became visible as an identity the harder it was for kids to ignore this possible option and as their parents expressed their homophobia to the TV as mine did, so did homophobia grow in schools.

One Nuclear Family Can Ruin Your Whole Day

Since gays were largely unwelcome in their families of origin, the lesbians and gay men of the early gay community created their own version of family that was inclusive of their entire community. Marriage was considered an archaic institution in the Marxist days of lesbian feminism. And there was much experimentation as to what a family might be. It included polyamory, extended families and the raising of children within these extended families. Meanwhile the feminist movement fought to redefine marriage and raise women up from the status of property owned by men to having their own identity and equal economic rights within a marriage. 

With the devastating years of the AIDS epidemic, the party gave way to a funeral and issues of inheritance of a dead partner's things came into play. The very real threat of a partner's family coming to claim all his/her belongings and the home you had built together was foremost in our minds and driven home by countless maudlin movies. 

A woman who owns her own house is a dangerous proposition I concluded when my ex lover asked me to leave her house, my home of five years, in favor of the new lover who had moved in. Once I made my home in Catherine's house it did make a difference to me, when after many years of cohabitation, Catherine offered to set up a living trust guaranteeing my ownership of the house should she meet an untimely demise. It made a difference to have that piece of paper because, rather than being prepared to leave at any given time, I was more inclined to put my effort and money into our home.

Marriage from a legal standpoint, without all the sentimental and religious overlay is essentially a matter of property. It is no accident that the woman who sued DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act) was a wealthy woman protecting her financial interests after her female companion died leaving her a sizable estate on which taxes were due to the tune of some $363,053 because her Canadian marriage to her spouse was not recognized on a federal level. With that amount at stake I would sue too.

The Taste of Victory

When the victories of DOMA and Prop 8 were announced there was an immense outpouring from my straight contacts on Facebook. It felt as if everyone had suddenly become PFLAG. Love was love, welcome to the American family. All this support and love moved me to reconsider my stance on gay marriage not just as a gay victory, but as a heterosexual victory. Marriage had been redefined by the presence of gay people into something cool and desirable. The struggle for gender equality within marriage would get a boost from those who have no gender inequality to consider. (There would still be inequalities related to education, money, class and possibly race, but at least these were gender neutral.)

This long fight for marriage equality (which is not over until every state has joined in) feels very much about privilege for some and not a lot about improving things for everyone. My health care has for many years hinged on Catherine's job and my status as her domestic partner. One of the insights of activists during the time of AIDS was that the gay community would see fit to use their alliance with other social justice movements and their growing political clout to mobilize for national health care. This was so threatening to the powers that be that during the Clinton era a bone was thrown to the LGBT community regarding gays in the military. In practical terms the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy enforced a closeted existence. In the run up to discussing gays in the military it created a diversion that divided the queer community against itself and installed a false gay agenda. LGBT activists were forced to accept the DADT policy as a win for all. Not.

The marriage equality campaign has trained a generation of lesbian and gay activists to work hard to write themselves into what is basically a non-inclusive institution based on the property rights of white men. As mainstream a convention as you can get — one that does not include any benefits for those not married. 

Speaking of a privilege every American should enjoy with few exceptions, the pinnacle accomplishment of the Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act was gutted the day before marriage equality peeled across the land. By the same Supreme Court. I did not see any sentiments expressed in the ranks of the privileged that we were all less American because of this. But the Voter ID laws that states are now allowed means that getting the required ID stipulated by these new laws costs money and time which translates to more poor people of color prevented from voting. (And trans people who may be accused of voter fraud because their ID does not match the gender they are presenting.)

No longer does the LGBT community identify with its most vulnerable, most disenfranchised members, but with its most privileged in what basically amounts to a trickle down promise. Now that we have our right to marry, goes the promise, we can get back to the rest of the gay agenda. Which was what exactly?

During the film festival my friend Dave and I watched as a representative of a short film about the age of consent attempted to remind the largely gay male audience of the vulnerability of not only gay youth, but all youth. 

"As you celebrate this marriage equality win", he said, "please consider that in order to support our youth we need to lower the age of consent." 

Yes that would certainly help. If young people had the right to make their own decisions about their sexual activity at least by the age of 15 as it is in Denmark, then they would have social services to turn to. The response of the audience was to literally shut him down. "Show the film," someone shouted. Followed by applause and then clapping in unison to drown him out. 

"Don't you see?" their arrogance seemed to say, "we are mainstream now. We will never again be mistaken for child molesters. We will show by our fine status as married couples that it will get better for gay kids. But we will in no way help until they have made the harrowing passage to the legal age of consent." Meanwhile there were weddings to plan.  

If anything had helped ease the passage of gay youth it was the entertainment industry which put more gay and lesbian teens in TV shows over the past few years than adult characters. There was also Brittany McMillan, a Canadian teen and self identified Christian straight girl who launched Spirit Day from her tiny tumbler blog in October of 2010. On that day we were to wear purple to show our support for LGBT teens who were victims of bullying. Over 1.6 million Facebook users signed up for the event which became highly visible as celebrities and TV anchors were seen wearing purple. I bought myself a purple ribbon that day and tied a bow around my pony tail to wear to my karate class. It was duly noted by my teen classmates and the head instructor gave quite a long talk after class about sticking up for your friends.

Occupy Marriage

Catherine had long ago become a proponent of marriage equality and felt it entirely unfair that there were some 1,049 benefits to marriage that were denied to us as domestic partners much of them with a financial impact. I had to agree with her that the benefits were substantial. I stopped arguing against the marriage equality campaign, but neither did I speak in support of it.

And now that  marriage had been made available to us, the political was suddenly made personal. I knew it was only a matter of time before she was going to pop the question. The differences in our incomes made our tax returns substantial as a married entity and that compensated for the time I put into our household chores. I had also proven my worth as a partner in the year that I accompanied her all those many hours during her cancer treatment.

I began to view marriage much like I had viewed becoming a citizen of the United States. As a legal platform from which to both protect myself and occupy a nation whose policies and treatment of others I did not entirely agree with. We were already living in the state of marriage, we had our green card—we were registered domestic partners, but to really occupy this construct we would need a passport, a marriage license.

On the day of Pride, while all those celebrants of marriage marched in record breaking heat downtown we sat in the cool of the Castro Theater for our final four hours of queer films as is our custom. It was there that Catherine asked me to marry her. And I said yes. She was very happy and so excited about this news that over dinner she wanted to know how I would announce it. It hadn't occurred to me to go that far, but she was eager to make it public as soon as possible. It made her happy to celebrate our commitment to each other and have it acknowledged in the eyes of the world. It was an expression of her love for me.

Forced to consider how we would play out this new status I knew it wouldn't be right to keep it secret after all I had said against marriage. This was too big an about face. And so I allowed that she could announce it in the most public way possible—on Facebook. She had taken a picture of me with her iPhone from across the table and when we got home posted it with her announcement. It was actually a nice picture (though we were not talking about the prospect of getting married at the time). Perhaps we could also do our wedding on Facebook. Okay maybe not.

I did attend a wedding once that informed me on the topic. It was a marriage of a middle aged straight couple, the bride a prominent environmental activists in our community. The wedding was held with a wildly dressed congregation of Faithful Fools. And a woman in a clown's nose got up to protest the union on the grounds that love was dangerous because if people committed to taking care of each other it would lead to political unrest and possible attempts to stop global warming. And if marriage was performed as an act of community activism who could stop the power of love? 

Okay, put that way I'm almost convinced. A relationship made stronger was a good base from which to love the world more. And the planet and all those we worked with and collaborated with for the good of all. It was also my hope that now that the queer community had attained this level of respectability that we would remember ourselves and become more wildly queer as an occupying force rather than behave as though we had succumbed to the sedate values of our captors. Yes this was a model I could expand upon to occupy marriage. Champagne anyone?

Report From the Queer Cinematic Front

This year's pride celebration was the refuge of even our straight brethren. Heck if you don't like the direction the country is going you can always party with us and have a fabulous time. Our yearly retreat to the silver screen of the Castro Theatre, was particularly fruitful.

Transgender was in, I could see as I leafed through the festival schedule. In its 29th year the San Francisco gay film festival was quietly embracing the full spectrum of queer possibilities. With little fanfare the festival title had been changed from 'gay and lesbian' to The San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. This was long overdue considering that it was ten years ago that the pride parade was renamed to include bisexual and transgender.

It is never easy to select which films. I was excited. How would gay filmmakers present our life in these difficult times? So spoiled were we by the increasing number of gay characters on HBO and two all queer sit coms of our own, would the film festival still transport us?

Judging from one of the showcased films, Happy Endings (soon to open at a theatre near you), gays and lesbians have earned a niche in middle class life. In this ensemble cast, the lesbians are attempting perfection in child raising and a gay couple (their best friends) are obsessed with the paternity of the child in case it turns out to be the product of one of their sperm donations. Harmless stuff of screwball comedy, but decidedly not gay. Not for me. This was a straight film with a straight lead character and gay people thrown in for a hip twist as they exemplify coupledom and child raising. Our talents are wasted here. Why compete in a straight paradigm?

More interesting was the world of a male to female transsexual just a week away from the surgery that would finalize her transformation. (One of the actresses from Desperate Housewives has the lead role, which is sure to evoke interest). Transamerica will open in mainstream theatres to deliver a story of the journey to self in the context of family relationships. Perfunctorily detailed, yet suspenseful and poignant, the audience is not asked to engage in the confusion of gender dysphoria, but in the character's determination to undergo the journey. Catherine and I were uplifted by the courage and nobility of this quest for integrity. This hero's journey was what being queer was about for us.

In Screaming Queens, Susan Stryker, a transgender historian brought us the little known tale of San Francisco's gay rebellion in the Tenderloin. A few years before drag queens fought back at the Stonewall bar in New York and launched the gay movement, there was a cafe in the Tenderloin called Compton's where the queens hung out. One night it was raided by police and a riot ensued. For the first time queers could see how powerful they could be as a group.

Screeming Queens Q & A

Their efforts were not recognized, explained the director, because there was no gay movement to recognize them. Only afterwards were gay groups beginning to form. During the Q & A at the screening, the now retired police officer she had interviewed came to the stage in his wheelchair. An audience member asked why he chose to speak up given the sentiments of his fellow officers. He spoke slowly and with effort. "As a member of my church, I just felt it was the right thing to do," he said. A startling revelation for these times and not one we expected.

The German coming of age story, Summer Storm, offered another gay journey with it's story of a teen hopelessly in love with his best friend and having to resolve their different paths. He does it without killing himself or suffering excessive trauma from his peer group. He even cracks a joke. A positive story of self-acceptance that includes a tender love scene worthy of any teen drama. Beautifully shot with high production values, it would be distributed in Europe by Warner Brothers, but in America only a little known distributor would pick it up, possibly not even for a theatrical release. When asked why, the director apologetically described the political climate in America today.

"I'm sorry, but this is what I see," he said, "As I traveled across the country I was very alarmed by the oppression by the religious right. This country used to be progressive, but not any more." Talk of the impact of the religious right on our lives makes me livid and I immediately want to buttonhole the nearest Christian and ask "how could you let this happen?" But we're not talking Christians here; we're talking about a group that more resembles the Klu Klux Klan without the scary outfits. We shouldn't need a German visitor to tell us this.

From Canada we were offered Eternal, a lesbian vampire movie to fulfill any hysterical homophobic right wing vision, but not nearly campy enough to be fun. My real objection to this Eyes Wide Shut, slick, horror flick was that it was cruel and heartless. The vampire was too eager to consume her victim in her greed for the blood that would give her eternal life. Why have eternal life for it's own sake? In my experience, the reward of the lesbian vampire - the initiator- is to facilitate the surrender of the 'victim' to forbidden pleasure. The lesbian vampire as change agent.

Forbidden pleasure is questioned in Tropical Malady, an unusual offering from my home country. Unlike any Thai movie I have ever seen, the film sets up a sweet love story then sends the lead character into the jungle by himself for the entire second half of the film. There he experiences what appears to be a complicated allegory for desire and is consumed by a tiger.

Castro Theater

Europe, too, is far ahead of us in exploring sexuality as a bridge to more expansive thoughts. From post-Milosevic Serbia we got Take A Deep Breath, one of the few films we saw without a happy ending. When asked why not, the director explained that the relationships in the film were political metaphors for a fractured country and Serbia was a country hard put to find happiness. What a concept! What if someone made a relationship picture to express Bush's America? What a tale of deception, lies and betrayal that would be.

While the father was predictably homophobic in the Serbian film, what was refreshing was the reaction of the mother upon learning that her daughter is gay. She smiles with emerging delight and gives her blessing. "Nobody has found a recipe for happiness yet," she says. Meanwhile she herself is divorcing her philandering husband.

Men, it seems are offering a poor partnership in the middle years of many women's lives. In the British film Gypo, the husband is taciturn and brutish, endangering the life of a young immigrant woman who has offered his wife love and affection. This stripped down film complies with an unusual set of anti-Hollywood rules established by the Danish Dogme95 society. It is cinema verite at its strictest, with hand held cameras, and no additional lighting or music. The severity of these rules strip nearly all the atmosphere from the scenes, but it still manages to offer surprising narrative development.

In the Finnish film Producing Adults, a potential husband slips his girlfriend an RU40 pill to get rid of a baby she wants, but he doesn't. She is befriended by a woman doctor who may just prefer women given that her own boyfriend is a lay about slob. Here again a mother is ecstatically happy that her daughter brings home a woman rather than a man. It takes the better part of the movie to figure out if this film will actually have gay content, but it grows on me and the pay off is delicious. So deft is the invitation of the doctor, so sensuous the response.

It is the Spanish film Sauvigne that really takes a lesbian relationship to a new level of emotional exploration. The lesbian director of the film plays the lead herself. She has been at the Festival before with her prize-winning film Costa Brava and the theatre is packed.

In this story our endearing, self-deprecating, heroine vies for the attention of an actress turned director to produce her play. The director is intrigued and with the advice of her theatre critic husband, persuades our heroine to restructure the entire play in order to explore her own grief over the death of her daughter. The characters are rendered with such maturity and self-observation that it is entirely believable when the mix of creative collaboration, lesbianism and grief reaches an unusual catharsis. This to me, is what queer cinema is capable of.

Film Fest Gang

For us the film festival was a return to our roots, to a psychic history that reminds us of our strengths, our transformative powers, our grit and resilient humor. Happy Pride.