“Here” being actually “over there,” there being Courage Campaign. Image takes you to Courage Campaign’s page, their PDF link direct to you here.

The PDF download lists who’s for and against the various California propositions on the ballot, and includes a brief synopsis along with Courage Campaign’s recommendations. John in Sacramento, at Firedog Lake, has a different take on one of the propositions, which you can read about here.

Whilst I was burnt to a crisp over our last opportunity to jigger the state’s politico-socio-economic landscape with the faux-populist proposition, I, along with many dutiful folks in the various states holding elections today, will drag my arse to the polls and vote all the same. Since a few local issues and party primaries are buried in and amongst the ballot measures in my state.

For those of you interested in Equality California’s candidate recommendations (both LGBT and pro-LGBT candidates), here’s their voter guide for Northern and Southern California. The endorsed candidates of the EQCA PAC are all listed (and detailed) here.

Elsewhere, I’m happy to pass on, “Other Issues Crowd Out Gay Marriage.”

If you’re in a state with elections today and forgot your polling place, find it here at Vote411.org.

[And if  you'll permit a brief an extended non-electoral editorial aside: please accept my apologies for light posting this past week, mebbe coming up week, too. We had a no-show Weekend bonus shot this past weekend, which I never like to see, and still consider a sad sign of overwhelm of one degree or another. I got some really great stuff in the hopper, but it's having to stay there longer than I like, due to lotsa work at Casa LD. Lotsa work meaning that unpaid time such as what's clocked here gets sucked up into the dryer/behind the couch cushions/name yer favorite ne'er to be returned from vortex. Similar vortex that sucked up my Blogging for LGBT Families Day post, and my ability to re-conjure both the spirit and the time.  Damn vortex. I have high hopes for the coming months, though, which include some significant family firsts, not least of which is preschool for the boychild, also known as GUARANTEED CHILDCARE TIME FOR THE BABA.  As me Pops is fond of saying, "The future lies ahead."]

Today’s California’s first observed Harvey Milk Day. Actions and celebrations are stockpiled here by EQCA and here on the Harvey Milk Day web page. Here’s the Milk Foundation’s site, which includes a great page on Harvey In Schools.  Our school district will be adapting HRC’s Welcoming Schools curriculum next year, as policy district-wide (first such district in the nation, thankyouverymuch!), and I reckon we’ll be working with this material plenty.  I look forward to reporting on it.

Our family  didn’t go door-to-door today, which some did (see the EQCA page), or attend a celebration out and about. We did talk about Harvey Milk, though, and liken him as someone who is, to mama’s and baba’s people, what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X are to their Auntie Rachel’s people. (Both Martin and Malcolm are celebrated in our school district; this past Monday was a school holiday for Brother Malcolm).  The word martyr is an important one, but one we haven’t broached yet. We have Kari Krackow’s kid’s book The Harvey Milk Story,  but stopped short of reading it this year.  The assassination is on the third to the last page; no graphic images but the following:

On a gray November morning, Dan White crawled through a basement window at the back of City Hall with a loaded gun.

Dan White entered the mayor’s office and, after a brief argument took place, shot Mayor George Moscone.  Reloading his gun, he hurried down the hall to Harvey Milk’s office. Five shots rang out.

Both Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk were killed.

The girl child is just too darn close a reader for us to skip a page, or even pretend to miss one and then substitute “death” for “assasination.” It’s a very sticky question, how and where to draw the lines around painful truths of adult life. I do know that once the topics of assassination and murder, the willful, malice-filled ending of someone else’s life  have been broached, Krackow’s book will be on-limits, rather than off.  Soon enough.  All this comes a-rushin’ in soon enough.

Our 3- and 5-year-old kids are well aware of death. The spirits of loved ones now dead are big parts of their everyday lives. And a dog was part of their family, then gone. They also know about the misunderstanding of people like mama and baba, even.  But assassination is another thing.  We’re going to go there, but not just yet.  It’s hard to pull the veil aside sooner than it has to be; harder still, I’m sure, to have a stranger do so before we’ve prepared them for the sight of things on the other side. As Brother Martin would often sing out in his speeches (about justice’s coming), “How long? Not long.”  I like what Brother Harvey said, too, though: “The important thing is not that we can live on hope alone, but that life is not worth living without it.”

There may not be an easy summary to the tangled mess, but if there were, it’d have something to do with the noxious mixture of a well-intentioned reference to gay people’s existence and (ooo! that was 140 characters!) a deeply-founded fear of (skittishness about? does the distinction make a difference?) representing us in three-dimensional, un-caricatured ways in high-stakes, big-money media products.  Clarifying and enumerating details to follow in tirade below. Er, make that lengthy, brazenly unedited tirade below.

I just watched the 19th episode of Glee, “Dream On.” You can watch the whole thing for yourself here at Hulu. Spoiler alert! This whole rant is a big ole, meandering SPOILER! So go watch it now if you want to stay unsullied for your viewing experience. Then get back here.

Glee, for those not in the know (what am I saying?) under a cathode ray tube-TV-sized rock, is a wildly popular FOX television show centering around the travails of a motley — and talented — crew of high school glee club members somewhere in Ohio.  It’s been called the queerest show on network television right now, what with its featuring one out gay male character (Kurt), a bisexual character or two (cheerleaders Santana and Brittany), an out lesbian in one leading role (Jane Lynch as sadistic cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester) and an out gay man a key member of the ensemble (Broadway’s Jonathan Groff), and a whole musical genre made grand by and arguably incapable of surviving without gay people (musical theater).  As the inimitable and must-readable Dorothy Snarker puts it: “Singing, dancing, snarking. Jane Lynch, jazz hands, gay cheerleaders. That’s just quality television, right there.” (Read up on her Glee bits here. And if you get lost there because she’s such a witty witty writer, I won’t blame you.  I’ll still love you the next time you remember to happen by here.  If you can tear yourself away from her blog. Now back to rant.)

Glee’s co-creator Ryan Murphy even burnished his bona fides as a champion for queer people in pop culture early last week when he called for a boycott of Newsweek for publishing a “blatantly homophobic” screed (written by, wait for it… a gay journalist!) against out gay actors playing straight characters, one of whom was a Glee regular. (Michael Jensen at AfterElton.com here on the initial Newsweek piece, which appeared in the May 10th issue; Jensen followed up with a piece reprinting Kristen Chenowith’s righteous response to the Newsweek essay, and a really interesting, big picture analysis, seemingly defending the journalist, but mostly directing our attention past him, by Aaron Sorkin at the Huffington Postlast week).

So you have it all lined up so far? Cheerful, plucky, gay-friendly ensemble TV show employs and portrays gay people; cranky, narrow-minded (eh? self-hating? much?) gay journalist critiques out gay actors for, well, acting (and all of them extremely successfully, from the standpoint of the craft and its professional recognitions) ; plucky gay-friendly TV show folk defend their queer brethren and call for a boycott of the magazine publishing the retro homophobic tripe.  That’s all the lead up to this week’s episode, in which out gay actor Neil Patrick Harris cameos as a former glee club star come back to haunt the high school as a budget-slashing school board member.  So far as I could see, most of the buzz (okay, I didn’t look much past Twitter and a few hasty Google searches) seems to have been about how convincing Harris was as a straight guy.  Even humorously so, since he and fellow out queer actor Jane Lynch have a scene in which sparks fly and intimations are made of immanent intimacy.

Okay, okay, fine.  EXCEPT. In all the buzz over the Newsweek piece and Neil Patrick Harris’ repudiation of its thesis in last night’s episode, something seems to be overlooked. Rachel, the lead character  has two dads (great!), neither of whom has ever appeared on the show (huh?).  The mom of another lead, Finn has appeared several times, and a rich plot line has emerged about his father, who was killed in the first US-Iraq war.  Another character, Kurt, our sumptuous and fabulous out gay character, has a reasonably nuanced and often deeply compelling relationship with his father, who has also appeared several times (his mother is deceased).  We’ve seen the two (condemning) parents of another secondary character, Quinn. That makes a total of five parents we’ve seen (if we count the photographs of Finn’s dad and his urn, both of which have appeared on screen).

Which parental round-up brings us to a question that should be obvious: Where. The f***. Are Rachel’s. Dads?

I know the staccato period thing makes that hard to read, so I’ll try again in another way: WHERE THE F*** ARE RACHEL’S DADS?

Rhetorical question.  Actual answer: Still offscreen.  Rachel, when depicted at home, floats around in a parent-less world, or rather, in her bedroom, which conveniently has a bathroom adjoining it so we don’t have to run a camera down a hall and see, oh, A FATHER.  Admittedly, the show focuses on the kids, so the parents appear only when they drive the kids’ storylines forward.  And a teenaged gal who spends a lot of time holed up in her bedroom (singing into her brush in front of the mirror) is not implausible. But hello. The reason Rachel is a Broadway-bound triple-threat phenom has GOT to have one eeensy, teensy bit to do with who the hell her parents are.  Yes?  Yes?  Big-ass, nelly-ass, Garland/Streisand/Gaga-loving queens, yes? At least ONE of them? I mean, her jazz hands prowess is not a coincidence, right?  But so far, we’ve had practically ZILCH development on this angle.  The writers better the hell have something great in the works, is all I can say.  Though the faces in the one quickie flash we saw of them (interracial couple? I can’t barely even remember, the flash on their framed photo was so quick and so early on and never again to be re-flashed) did not reveal any actor known to me or my culture-vulture actor-attuned partner as a character or supporting actor.  I hope to simply be underinformed here.

Okay, lodge that question in your heads (if you haven’t watched the show), and then reflect on the fact that the first time we see any adult related to Rachel, the first time we latch on to a face connected to her in any sort of parental way  is — “No!” you say! “Don’t say it!” you say! “No they did not!” you say!  But sadly, I have to say, “Yes, they did!” — Rachel’s birth mother! Yes! Referred to simply as her “mother”! And she appears because — “No!” you say! “Yes! I say —  she appears because Rachel’s dads “never said anything about her” and Rachel is dying to know who she is. Yes! Apparently, gay parents can raise a kid for 16, 17 years and never speak to her about her biological origins! Even though we’re the only parents who actually HAVE any real interesting things to SAY to our kids about their biological origins! Which our kids might be interested in, and ask us about! (With everyone else, it’s all, “Eeeeeew, gross, Mom/Dad!” and then the fingers are plugged in the ears and loud, alphabet song singing commences.) Amazing, right! Who knew?

Aside #1: And no, I’m not minimizing her curiosity about meeting her birth mother. I’m maximizing the absence of her fathers and her relationship to them before this plotline emerged.

Aside #2: By stroke of blazing coincidence, Jeff DeGroot at COLAGE, the national organization for people with LGBT/Queer parents and their families, just completed a year-long project in which he surveyed and interviewed COLAGErs and produced a guide designed to “to answer the questions and address the concerns of current and future generations of donor-conceived children.” It’ll be released this Saturday, May 22 — California’s first annual Harvey Milk Day.  More info here.  Now back to rant again.

Rachel is on a quest to find out about her birth mother (I have to say it that way, if they won’t on the show), and — “No!” (you) “Yes!” (me) — she’s played by a huge actor! Who’s already got an established, intrigue-filled role on the show as the director of the arch-rival school’s glee club! And wait! Yes! She originated Elphaba in Wicked on Broadway and in London!  None other than Idina Menzel!  But wait! It gets worse! She’s heart-sick about having “given away” Rachel, and the musical number they do (not in the “real life” part of the plotline, but in the imaginary duet-world of musicals) is… wait for it… Fantine’s “I Dreamed a Dream,” from Les Miserables! Yes! The two of them, two of the most kick-arse Broadway beltin’ performers, singing arguably the best-known and most emotive song from one of the most popular musicals in Broadway’s history (for the Les Mis innocents: it’s the third longest-running show of all time; it’s still running in London; it was nominated for 12 Tonys, won 8, etc. etc.).  Except that “she” is swapped for the “he” in this verse, as Rachel sings it:

And still I dream she’d come to me
That we would live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather.

Rachel goes on:

I had a dream my life would be
So different from the hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

That “hell” she’s living would be, wait. Yes! The hell of living with two loving parents who are both men. I know, I know. It’s drama. It’s fake musical number land.  But what the f***? How can the writers of a show renowned for trying to humanize not just gay people, but gay youth and the kids of gay parents, have left an absence so gaping, a hole in their script so big you could drive a whole 19th c. French battallion through it? It’s as jaw-dropping as an out gay journalist arguing that out gay actors are, ipso facto, implausible as straight characters.

Okay, I’ve gone on and on. About a damn TV show about a bunch of high school kids singing musical numbers on stage and in imaginary musical number land.  No, I do not look to mass culture/ for-profit media for the big civil rights barricade-storming. But for all its genre-bound limitations and its having swung and missed on a good handful of other matters, I, like lots of other folks, had begun to expect more of the writers on this show. This “queerest” of network TV shows. Adored by millions of people, chief among them (I’ve got to believe) impressionable high school students, who feel, usually rightly, that the drama which drives their lives is often truthfully, often delightfully portrayed by an extremely talented ensemble.  Which whole ensemble is invited to come and perform at the White House for its Easter Sunday Egg Roll, fer chrissakes.  These are the young people who will soon be voting in or out our civil rights over the next critical, sure-to-be-action-packed decade. I care what they think and think they know about me and my family.

When we were watching the Rachel story line in the episode, all’s the beloved and I could do was mutter shocked expletive deletives to each other. Which increased to a crescendo when we saw the writers paired  birth mother and her crypto-orphaned daughter in the heart-tugging Les Mis duet. In a fit of misguided pique, the beloved said she would boycott Glee.  But I know that wouldn’t last a week.  It’s a great show. I had thought. Now I think, shit. Is it really that hard to do? To take on complex issues with heart and mind together, neither one compromised, and the both not compromised by the chronic, criminal underestimation of what actual people in the viewing audience are capable of taking in?  Don’t answer that. On second thought, please do.

I know same-sex and/or trans parents must have appeared in more richly nuanced portraits on TV already elsewhere. Right? And I’ve just gotten lax on my TV viewing habits since getting all tied up with this parenting gig. Right?

I know there’s a lot more to say here, and I’ve blown through over ten times 140 words to get this far (much less 140 characters).  I’m amazed if you’ve gotten this far with me.  But a rant, by definition, is not rigorously edited.

By the same token, I probably could have done it all in a Tweet, with characters to burn:

Et tu, Glee?

Or on a slightly less melancholy note,

Elphaba ate Rachel’s gay dads, and I’m not very happy about it.

One thousand bloggers in the same hotel may be a wee strain on the system. Credit to the crack BlogHer events planning tech crew and the Sheraton, who has been feverishly installing/upgrading/what have you. I understand there may be a bellhop or two whose job this weekend is to lean precariously out a window holding a satelite dish in juuuuust the right position.

Now on to the quick note, before I rejoin the happy fray. There will be the jet-setters among you who are out and about all the time, and are utterly dulled to the jaw dropping wonder of the SkyMall magazine. But by my calculations, it has been just over two years that I took a plane somewhere. So I was utterly unprepared for the garden sculptures section of the magazine, which featured, yes,  a GARDEN SASQUATCH.

You might say to yourself, “What is Bigfoot doing in the garden?” But the SkyMall magazine has no real answer to that question. What it does do is provide the following description of the product, which is called “Bigfoot, the Garden Yeti”:

 

With his characteristicaly big feet, our more than two-foot tall Garden Yeti will have guests doing a double-take as they admire your creative home or garden style! With alleged sightings the world over, from the highest Himalayas to the United States, this elusive, mythical legend has been captured exclusively for [name of poor besotted company withheld for its own good] in quality designer resin and hand painted for startling realism.

 

 

Above Sasquatch were a trio of meercats (yup). After I had fixed my jaw back in place, I turned the page to find “The Zombie of Montclaire Moors.”  Yes I did.

 

 Not for the faint of heart, this [name of company withheld for its own good]-exclusive, life-size (sic), gray-toned zombie will claw his way out of your garden plot, office, or family room corner, pleading for assistance with the eeriest undead eyes you’ve ever sen.  Captured in meticlulous detail in quality designer resin and finished so realistically that you’ll swear you can hear him breathing! (Arrives in 3 pieces)

Looks disturbingly like John Malkovitch.

Now to the happy fray. If you’re here, track me down and I’ll hug you with the zest of 10 Leo Buscaglias! And if we imbibe too much at the evening parties, we can always use this SkyMall hangover remedy.

Sorry that I couldn’t find the Ernestine Anderson version of this, which is my favorite. (“Ain’t nothin’ in Chicago for a sweet little boy like you to do,” sez she.) Apart from his preamble, I do like this Joe Williams version as my second favorite.

As you read these words, I will either be en route to this fine town, or milling about in a hotel there with about a thousand other women bloggeristas. Will report when/if possible.

Though I imagine there will be no dearth of reportage on the event, in the blogosphere and the Twittersphere. For obvious reasons. If anything, I fear the power will dip or go out entirely in that block. Power to women indeed.

Musical accompaniment courtesy Mr. Louis Armstrong. Okay so the “so sweet, so cold, so fair” part is a bit of an exaggeration.  I mean, they’re clammy, yes, but not cold. Certainly not in the sense implied.  I do feel a bit like an infirmary worker, I will say that much.

Upside? I got these people in my life to care for, period.  Jasureyoubetcha, as they say in all-one-word in my erstwhile adoptive home of Minnesota.

*By the way: Freedom to Marry Week started yesterday, and lots of people are writing and talking about it in one way or another.  Mombian and Page One Q have something going on: The Only Agendais Love, and Freedom to Marry has Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter conversations going on. And Robin Reagler is hosting her Some/thing (Old, New, Borrowed, Blue) carnival again.  I’d have hoped to have posted a little something for each venue (the Agenda carnival and the Some/thing one).  The goal: find a fresh — and mutually uplifting? — take on the topic.  Unfortunately, St. James’ Infirmary calls.  Hope springs eternal that less will be springing internally, and soon.

Couldn’t have said it better myself: a series by Maira Kalman, “The Inauguration. At Last.”

She’s been given a berth the last Friday of the month at The New York Times, “And the Pursuit of Happines,” in which she’ll explore American democracy.  I might find myself tempted every now and then to send you over there.  If her eye for detail and the moment continue to do such a fine job of conveying what I might have liked to have conveyed, had I been there.  Wherever there is.  Was.

[By the way: Kalman refers, in the series, to having listened to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's singing Bach cantatas en route down to Washington.  Which makes me want to say: listen to this.  Nine minutes six seconds.  And also say: here, here's the second part.  And the third.  But just a minute sixteen seconds into the first part, that will do.  Her voice singing: Ich habe genug, I have enough.  (Also: I have had enough? Depends I suppose on what you're listening for.)  Some might have seen her sing this, directed (I think) by Peter Sellars, decked out in hospital garb, indicating terminal illness.  When you know that she died quite young -- quite, quite in her prime -- of cancer.  Well.]

Here’s the situation.  I was riding my bike back home yesterday afternoon, and heard the sound of piano wafting through an open window.  I circled the bike back and stood there underneath it for minutes on end, loving the piece, before it occurred to me that I could record it and ask someone what it was. There was a ton of gorgeous music before the passages recorded here, which, I suppose if you know the piece, you know. If’n you don’t, well. Take my word for it.

Since I’ve never used the damn cameraphone video jobbie before this, you’ll have to excuse the unimaginative camera work.  Half-way through the second clip it occurred to me that at least I could point the camera at something other than the Modigliani-esque winter shadows. So then I feature the second smartest bike accessory I’ve ever purchased (after the front tire’s mini “flickstand”). Not because it has any symbolic significance whatsoever. Really I just needed to capture the sound, which is emanating from the window above the garage in front of which I’ve stopped.

S’pose I could have pointed directly at the window, but somehow that would have felt kinda creepy. Like more brazenly clandestine.

Anyway! So can anyone tell us what this music is?

You have three clips of around 50 seconds each on which to base your estimation.  I wish I were flush enough to promise to buy you your own copy of the music, in gratitude.  Instead I can just say: Thank you! (And the cause of literary accuracy — if I actually wind up posting the stream of consciousness thingie this inspired — thanks you!)

Made from words in Obama’s inaugural speech, and found here. Thanks to granolasusan’s Twitter stream.  Press the “click to interact” jobbie and you’ll see it more clearly, and be able to fiddle with the words a bit.  Puts one to mind of Edward Tufte, just a little bit.

[And here, Stanley Fish offers a more analytical than visual take on the speech. Winding up, interestingly, at a point quite nicely depicted by the image above.]

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.  

Because the California Council of Churches, along with the Episcopal Bishops of California & Los Angeles, the United Church of Christ’s Northern & Southern California and Nevada Synods, the Progressive Jewish Alliance, and the Unitarian Univeralist congregations and legislative ministries constitute one of the six parties or groups of parties named in the case against Prop 8.  While none of them would likely say they exclusively speak for G_d almighty, I’ll bet most of them would say they try hard to speak to her/him.  And inspire others to pause and give her/him a good deal of thought.  Letters in support of the suit have also been filed by:

 The Bar Association of San Francisco et al., along with:

Forty-Four Members of the State Legislature
Anti-Defamation League et al.
Beverly Hills Bar Association et al.
Los Angeles County Bar Association
Sacramento Lawyers for Equality of Gays and Lesbians et al.
Manning & Marder, Kass, Ellrod, Ramirez
Constitutional Law Center (Monterey College of Law)
Hastings College of the Law
Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein
Richards, Watson, & Gershon
The Ecumenical Catholic Church
Donna M. Ryu (Hastings College of the Law)

CA Supreme Court page on the case here.

And while you’re in a juridical frame of mind, why not take a stroll down memory lane ( the secular social scientific alley thereof) and read even just the Table of Contents of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s 37-page amicus curiae for the original In re: marriages case.  Every subsection title is a sock in the gut.  And true (all bullet points below directly from their brief):

• Under California law, domestic partnership is not equal to marriage

• • The different requirements for the formation and dissolution of domestic partnerships and marriages reflect a dramatically different attitude of the state toward the underlying relationships
• • California courts continue to deny domestic partners legal rights and obligations that are routinely given to married people
• • Domestic partners have a reduced ability to obtain equal rights and benefits that might otherwise be available under other laws, including those of other states, other countries, and the federal government

• The separation of domestic partnership and marriage negatively affects the hearts and mids of same-sex couples and their children and fosters discrimination against them

• • The segregation of same-sex couples into a separate legal institution creates inherent inequalities
• • The state’s segregation of same-sex couples into a separate institution of domestic partnership inherently stigmatizes their relationship as inferior
  • • The government’s choice of labels conveys substantive meaning
  • • The stigma created by the state’s differential treatment of gay men and women has severe psychological and social impacts
  • • The separation of domestic partnership and marriage fuels public prejudice against gay men and women and invites the public to discriminate against them
• • Depriving same-sex couples of the ability to marry has adverse effects on their children [not looking forward to reading this section]

• The state offers no substantive justification for the segregation of same-sex couples into a distinct and inferior institution.

Well then.  Court adjourned.