Chocolate pecan pie sous-chef, Berkeley, CA.
Archive | November, 2008
Flash! Anti-gay marriage campaigns cause psychological distress to
Lojong teaching #13
Pancake hearts, made as antidote to Prop 8 hate, mid-campaign.
After my mom died (now over fifteen years ago), I was thrust into that heightened state of awareness one has in the wake of the death of someone close. The world carries on as if nothing’s changed, except you’re rocked to your core. You see pettiness as petty, because it is. You see the preoccupation with anything other than love and compassion to be misguided at best, destructive at worst. You know how short life is. I was aware of, and tried to hold tight onto, an accute sense of what really matters. It’s the single most powerful gift the dead give the living.
In the year following my mother’s death, I asked the dieties for a ten year reprieve on loss, and I was dazzlingly fortunate to have received it. I was given a decade during which to lick wounds, to breathe deep, to consider love again, to readjust to a world moved by something else besides my mother’s centrifugal force. Ten years during which to see what was left of her (the essence of her love), and what really would slip away (the memory of her voice).
A dozen years after my mother died (six weeks after my daughter was born), a close friend died in an accident. Six months after that my ten-year-old nephew died, following a short, intense battle with brain and spinal cord cancer. These two died not just younger than I expected (as did my mother), but relatively young, or just young, period. Really young. With their leave-takings, my awareness of what really matters became not just a gift from the dead to me, but my gift to the dead in my life. I couldn’t keep from thinking: what can I give them? That they can have left something here, when they left their lives. And the simple answer was: gratitude.
My challenge was to hold on to that insight. Come what may.
The tenacity of hope
What the man said, in 1978, not long before his assasination [with some gratuitous modern editorializing]:
Without hope, not only [white] gays, but those [nongay] Blacks, and the Asians, and the disabled, the seniors — the “us’s — the “us’s” — without hope, the us’s give up. I know that you cannot live on hope alone. But without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you have got to give ‘em hope.
Thanks to Sara at Suburban Lesbian Housewife for my first viewing of this.
And, in related news, we also have her to thank for alerting me to a link to an amicus brief to the California Supreme Court in defense of Prop 8 by a woman who’s an “heiress of The Almighty Eternal Creator,” on behalf of the almighty G_d him/herself. Not kidding here. Read it and weep. And then don’t loose grip on that hope that Brother Harvey just instilled in you.
CA State Capitol Tomorrow, Nov 22!
I heard about this event yesterday from a fine fine lesbian blogger in the town of my birth:
Please join us as we reach out to all the citizens of California to demonstrate that we will not tolerate discrimination to be written into our State Constitution.
Who: Anyone and everyone.
Where: California State Capitol Building, Sacramento, CA
When: 11/22/08 2:00PM
Why: Equal Rights are inalienable and CANNOT be taken away.
In 1987 the largest rally for gay rights in Sacramento took place, counting 15,000 strong. We need to stand together and make a statement that we will not stand idly by and let the rights of our sons, daughters, parents, and friends be taken away. Twenty one years later — Are YOU ready to make history?
And hey: Attorney Gloria Allred and comedians Margaret Cho & Selene Luna are confirmed speakers!
Co-sponsored by:
Equality Action Now | Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays | California Outreach
Flash! Anti-gay marriage campaigns cause psychological distress to gay people!
The irony in the post title here is in no way meant to undermine the truth of the statement. Only to perhaps indicate, through example, some of the impact of that stress: mild delirium and a slighly wild-eyed, gallows humor.
Whilst perusing the Gay Tax Protest site, I saw a piece on this November 18 American Psychological Association press release: “Anti Same-Sex Marriage Amendments Spark Psychological Distress Among GLBT Adults and Their Families, According to New Research.”
To which I know most of you will react: Doy! Many of us have been writing about this from an anecdotal standpoint (Terrence’s recent piece, “What It’s Like For Our Children,” for instance, springs right to mind). But having bona fide research data to back it up, from the APA, kind of sinks it all in deeper.
Three studies were reported on. In one,
Participants reported feeling not just alienated from their communities, but fearful that they would lose their children, that they would become victims of anti-gay violence or that they would need to move to a more accepting community.
Yup. Sounds familiar.
“Minority stress” is the term used to describe the “chronic social stress that minorities experience as a result of social stigmatization.” Any of us queer folk and our families who lived through an anti-gay marriage campaign in our home state, or an anti-gay people as foster child adopter campaign, as the case may be, can show you our scars from this particular brand of it.
That’s one third of the story. Another third is that we can and do all help each other a great deal:
- Laurie: I really love this picture. I bet that was a g...
- Lesbian Dad: And now, a bit of Mr. Sendak in his own words. ...
- Lesbian Dad: Mama, you made perfect sense. My own shoulders dow...
- rev2bebt: Ah, yes, but in New York City, if you actually loo...
- Solitary Diner: What a gorgeous building. I used to be hesitant a...
- Lesbian Dad: I can't tell you all how deeply I appreciate his ...
An eensy beensy administrative note
For those who notice such things, or give them any thought (or read this blog in its direct form, and not in a feed reader) I figured I ought to point out the obvious: I’ve started running ads on this here jobbie.
It became painfully obvious long ago to she who tends our family finances (two guesses! nope! not me! guess again! right: the beloved!) that despite its unquantifiable value to me, we couldn’t keep on shelling out for the operating costs of this blog. As all who do their own blogs know, the sundry costs of web hosting, photo hosting, domain name registries, and other sundries (in my case occasional surveys) add up to make it an expensive hobby. An invaluable one, to be sure, but an expensive one.
As a staunch anti-commercialist — I want a marketplace of ideas, here, I cried, not a marketplace of products; we need to promote more LOVE, not more Dove! etc. — I pondered nearly every other route to getting this thing to cover its costs.
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