My dear friend Ruth only has one week left in Los Angeles before she must return to Holland. Her work visa application has been denied. She was given just three weeks to leave behind her girlfriend of five years, with whom she shares a home and a life.
If Ruth had been with an American man for the past five years, there would be no problem. She would have been married and have a green card in her wallet by now, but because she has been in a monogamous relationship with a woman, the United States government denies her right to live and work in this country, and before you ask, even a legally recognized state marriage in any state that allows such, is not federally recognized. Her marriage to a woman would not give her the right to live and work in the US with the person she loves.
That state federal legislation deny queer people the right to marry affects us all. These are the civil rights we need to protect our children and families. The right of gay partners to share joint custody of children, share property, health insurance and tax returns and visit our sick partners in the hospital are all withheld without a marriage license. Even those in state recognized same-sex marriages are denied 1,138 federal benefits awarded to opposite sex-couples. The ability to marry a foreign national and give them a green card just as is awarded heterosexual couples is unavailable to queer American’s like Ruth’s partner and I. My girlfriend of two years and I will be moving back to the UK to marry when her work visa expires.The effect ripples out beyond us as queer individuals. Our families bear the brunt of our compromises as well. At very best, I will get to see my younger sister once a year over the course of her young adult life. The choices will be between a family Christmas or her college graduation, my father’s 60th birthday or her wedding.
Anti-queer marriage legislation asserts that the love we express as LGBTIQ people is less relevant than that of heterosexual people. The laws differ state by state but the punch line is always the same: “Your love is invalid so you don’t deserve to live with the same civil rights extended to heterosexual couples.” The Mandukya Upanishad simply states, “All here is God; the soul is God.” Indeed yogic philosophy would have it that there is no room for conditionality in the matter.
Traditional marriage beliefs uphold dichotomous gender norms stating that being born with one of two sets of genitalia entitles you to a certain gender role. A person is assigned a sex and gender role that is then mandated for them to fall in love with someone of a conceived opposite sex and gender role. This thought paradigm insists that sex and gender are static, fixed points of identity. That one comes into this world as a man, and is socialized to play with toy trucks, wear blue, later blue business ties, and fall in love with a woman who wears pink skirts, plays with dolls and now wants nothing more than to be a wife and mother.
My yoga practice has taught me that nothing is fixed, that everything is fluid. I have learned that nothing separates me from the person on the mat next to me, in the car next to me, in the relationship next to me. We are all sharing the same energy, the same Purusha (Absolute Truth), the same lifetime of working through Karma on our way to stillness and later Moksha (liberation). To say that social constructs of “gender” and “sexuality” can simply define who we are is as irrelevant as fighting over which religion has defined God correctly. The reality is that we are all so many things, so many gender traits, so many sexualities, so many expressions of love to so many understandings of God. Gender roles and sexual identities are social constructs we learn and recreate. They speak nothing of the true nature of our beings.
How can we stand by when some are denied rights based on something so irrelevant to love as gender and sexuality? To accept state and federal legislation against gay marriage, even though you think it might not affect you, is to say that a pure shared consciousness does not permeate us all. It is to say that at base, we are different, that we are not all entitled to true love, to our true nature and to peace. The Chandogya Upanishad states, “Tat Tvam Asi”, meaning, “God dwells within me, as me”. If it is important to you that your community honors the Absolute Truth in all of us, as all of us, speak up. Write your representatives, donate your time, and share your devotion to love with others.
“Hello, Washington? It’s me, civil rights!”
October 28, 2009
Just because you rallied in WeHo for Prop 8 don’t mean you’re work is done. The campaign for marriage equality is a national issue, and we need to support each individual state’s battle. Call your friends in Washington, Maine, and Michigan, TODAY.
Washington:
Who we are: Approve Referendum 71 is the campaign to preserve domestic partnerships in Washington State. By voting to approve, voters retain the domestic partnership laws that were passed during this year’s legislative session, including using sick leave to care for a partner, adoption rights, insurance rights, and more.
What we need: We need phone bankers to get our supporters out to vote. Washington is an all mail-in ballot state, and we need to ensure our supporters put their ballots in the mail. Also, youth turnout is a critical component of our campaign, and youth turnout historically drops in off-year elections. So we need a lot of help to turn them out.
How you do it: Sign up here to make remote calls for Approve 71. We’ll then contact you for a training, and you can make GOTV calls.
Maine:
Who we are: The No On 1/Protect Maine Equality campaign is working to protect Maine’s recently-passed law legalizing marriage equality for same-sex couples. Our opponents have put the issue on the ballot for Nov 3, 2009. Because of Maine’s early voting election laws, people are already voting at the polls, so we need help immediately to turn out our side at the polls.
What we need: We need you to devote a few hours to Call for Equality. Call for Equality is a virtual phonebank set up so that you can call Maine voters wherever you are. Much of Maine is rural, where canvassing isn’t effective, so we need to reach these voters- along with other supporters- by phone. All you need is a phone and internet connection. No experience required! We’ll provide the training, and all you need is a a few hours to help get a win in Maine.
How you do it: Click here to sign up for a training and your shift. There are lots of times available for your convenience.
Kalamazoo, MI:
Who We Are: The Yes on Ordinance 1856 / One Kalamazoo campaign is working in Michigan to support the City Commission of Kalamazoo’s twice approved ordinance for housing, employment, and public accommodation protections for gay and transgender residents. Opponents forced a public referendum on the ordinance so dedicated local volunteers, led by former Stonewall Democrats Executive Director Jon Hoadley, are working to ensure voters say YES to fairness and equality and keep Ordinance 1856.
Why The Urgency: In the final weeks, the opposition has gone all out with aggressive disinformation and misleading red herrings to try to defeat the ordinance. This includes signs that say “No to Discrimination” (even though voting No actually supports continued discrimination of GLBT residents), transphobic door hangers and fliers, and now radio ads that falsely suggest that criminal behavior will become legal when this simply isn’t true. The Yes on Ordinance 1856 supporters are better organized but many voters who want to vote for gay and transgender people are getting confused by the opposition.
How To Help:
1) Help the One Kalamazoo campaign raise a final $10,000 specifically dedicated to fight back against the lies on the local TV and radio airwaves and fully fund the campaign’s final field and GOTV efforts.
Give here: http://www.actblue.com/page/3-2-1-countdown
2) If you live nearby and can physically volunteer in Kalamazoo sign up here. If you know anyone that lives in Kalamazoo, use the One Kalamazoo campaign’s online canvass tool to remind those voters that they need to vote on November 3rd and vote YES on Ordinance 1856 to support equality for gay and transgender people.
Contact voters: http://www.onekalamazoo.com/tellfriends2
A Lesson in Vedic Gossip
October 26, 2009
This weekend, I enjoyed listening to a revered meditation Guru speak. He touched on the issue of spotty practice, that is missing meditation sessions here and there. This is a big struggle for me. Most days, I get in a single session instead of the recommended 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night. Using a rather reductionist approach, this Guru suggested that one would have time for their second daily meditation if they spent less time “gossiping” and such… This made my heart sink. I’m a young professional in a big city. My days are packed with 10 hours of production work, 2 hours of LA traffic to commute, a flailing writing habit, the lucky chance at an asana practice, household chores, immigration research, oh yeah and feeding kittens.
Yes, creative organizing could find me the sneaky 20 minutes it requires to get that second session in…But I’m frustrated to find that I’m still creatively organizing at maximum capacity just to make it into bed each night without the kettle still screaching and the gas bill payed. That is to say that I lack the energy, the patience, the devotion, to make a quick snack to tide me over until meditation is done, when a meal still must be prepared after, kittens are hungry, the dishes are high, it’s 9 pm and I’ve just made it home, starving and disillusioned.
Perhaps, I thought it would be better by now, that my spotty meditation practice would have instilled in me a grace, a deeper energy, to carry me through the small stuff, to waste less brain on the big stuff. But I’m still at wits end.
And I’m waiting to fall in love with myself in the practice…to be called to the practice like they say one’s body is when the practice becomes up for negotiation. The thing is, I’m full up with road blocks to stillness. My practice still consists of 80% running to do list narrative and 20% approaching stillness most often interrupted by rising fear or anger. In that 20%, past the fear that comes up, I can see IT. I can see how much more time I need, how much more I could let go of and how GOOD it will be when I do. But I have to work through lunch today and I’m worried about having to work on my girlfriend’s birthday, family holiday heartache, paying for my dental work, the war in Afghanistan, and the gay marriage campaign in Maine…
Maybe it’s just that I’m pushing too hard. That I’m expecting too much. The same way I expect perfection of myself in everything I do in the world, so do I expect perfection from everything I do inside my own inner world. I’ve forgotten that I am already perfect inside…that I don’t have to do anything but just show up to find my perfect inner nature. Yes, it will be scary some of the time, to sit through the anger and the fear that I’ve accrued over this lifetime and many before it. So I’ll keep showing up as often as I can. Maybe not every morning and every night, maybe not everyday. But I will keep showing up.
National Equality Marches in a New Generation
October 15, 2009
Sure the National Equality March on Washington was an epic media failure and an untimely distraction from the localized battles for queer rights waged in Maine and Washington, but as Lydia DePillis at Campus Progress reported, the march brought an unexpectedly high turnout from young activists. De Phillis said ; “Young people came from colleges all over the country—some call them the Prop. 8 generation or Stonewall 2.0.” and as you’d expect the youth of today to be called to arms, David Valk, the march’s Student Outreach Coordinator, later explained he organized their attendance almost entirely through facebook.
Well shoot, I’m excited.
As a Californian, I received condolences from many a straight ally when Prop 8 passed in a blaze of Orange County Evangelical glory. My response though often further confused my only slightly interested straight friends. I told them that I had expected it to pass and while that was a shame, I was excited to see the response from young Californians that the election had engendered. After all this is a generation of first-time voters who spent high school watching Will & Grace in prime time and Britney kiss Madona on MTV. These are straight kids who respect their LGBT counterparts and don’t support their elders instincts to suppress and closet them and LGBT kids who might now have a slightly easier time coming out now than someone did 20 or even 10 years ago. I know that I’m making a giant oversimplification of current pop culture. Will & Grace gives visibility only to the white wealthy buttoned up male while painting his queeny sidekick in the same zany piss take Hollywood’s used since the 1920’s and Britney and Madonna’s kiss subscribed to every stereotype that satisfies the male exploitation of lesbian sexuality but these images help make today’s youth much more comfortable with sexuality than the cast of Happy Days ever did.
This is a generation who don’t think it’s such a big deal to be gay because their world was just that bit more welcoming than ours was. But as gay culture became a bit more homo-normative, lgbt youth seemed less inclined toward a politicized identity. So when Prop. 8 passed and students and young professionals poured out of UCLA, out of West Hollywood and onto Wilshire Blvd night after night, I mused aloud to my uninterested straight coworkers how it was a good thing that this new generation of queers and their allies finally had something general and communal enough to get angry about. So they marched and tweeted and facebooked up a storm and they learned that we still have so much work to do despite the attention focused on us in the 90’s as consumers from television networks and vodka advertisers.
Prop. 8 made youth take notice in California and nationwide. They are angry now, they are active now, and they have new tools. How do older activists engage these passionate youth and their new-fangled technological devices?
LA’s “Lesbian Attack” Gets Stuck by the Man.
October 9, 2009
“Lesbian Attack” is a relatively new action group with the mission,”to infiltrate Los Angeles’ best straight bars and gay ‘em up with the hottest women we know. We don’t make deals with the bars; we don’t warn them we’re coming and we don’t advertise. This is a grass roots effort. Just OUR favorite women and THEIR favorite women.”
Next week ’s event has been announced with plans to attend an irrelevant sports bar on Melrose. In her most recent announcement Jones explains, “Though we don’t take money or warn the bars, we do want to take care of you. So we’ve booked the VIP room upstairs for a “private social mixer” to ensure everyone entry to El Guapo. Downstairs, there will be plenty of brews and confused boys. Upstairs, you can take a break from freaking out the straights with our private bar tender and DJ.”
Just When you Thought it was Safe to Turn on Showtime…
September 4, 2009
oh heeeeell no.
i thought we were done with The L Word?
Ilene Chaikin also thought her pilot for The Farm was gonna get picked up by Showtime… Turns out she was wrong.
Since they’ve passed, Chakin has found new inspiration from The L Word series she managed to run into the ground on the first go. The Real L Word: Los Angeles will feature “real” LA lesbians doing, you know, la lesbian stuff: drinking, partying, being incredibly femme, doing pilates, fame whoring and crying. Because as Chaiken said, “I believe we are not nearly finished telling our L Word stories.”
The thing is, the LAST thing anyone in the lgbtiq communities need is to tell more of these stories. Perhaps, at one point, it was important to establish ourselves as consumers, as a viable source of commerce, and now every major city has a row of gay bars and absolute vodka effin loves us now that we’ve shown we can party. And sure, the world as a whole loves consuming shows about vapid star fuckers vying for a piece of the la lifestyle via reality programming fame. But I fail to see how a reality show about lesbians who are fame hungry, sexy drinkers is going to improve the image of lesbians in the common consiousness of viewers.
We have better stories to tell. I’d much rather make and/or watch a show that followed women who are doing work that is for the betterment of lgbtiq people everywhere. Rather, we will watch The Real L Word which insists that real lesbians are heterosexual in appearance, over sexed and incapable of monogamy. If you want to make the point that lesbians are just like everyone else, why not follow a woman or couple who is living in everyday society, working, loving, etc and then explore how she encounters homophobia or oppression in her life. Then viewers might find commonalities to identify with, influencing their concept of gaynes as “otherness”. Rather, The Real L Word will support the concept that the lesbian woman is here for the fantasy of hetero men.
We have the blessing of having a voice in this country that so many elsewhere don’t. I think it’s unfortunate that this type of program is often how we choose to use it.
Activism, meet your new friend Branding.
September 11, 2008
Tim Gill is a wealthy, white, male US citizen. One can only imagine the endless privilege available to someone like him. The fact that he is a wealthy, white, gay male, US citizen of course compromises his access to every privilege extended through institutional patriarchy. However, so many gay men like him, who can hide their difference and maintain their “normalcy” in the boys club, do just that. Maybe Tim Gill did that for awhile, he made his money, a lot of money. But these days the software millionaire has stepped outside the inner circle, in order to reach out, around, up and down, to all those on the fringes who are fighting against marginalization. The Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado was founded by Gill in 1996 with the mission of “financially supporting nonprofit organizations that enhance the quality of life in Colorado and promote equality for all people, while highlighting the contributions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. ” The Fund’s policy is to award grants to non profits serving minority and deserving populations, non of them lgbt, with the stipulation that the fund’s name, ‘The Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado” always be prominently displayed in their literature. That means supporters of The Latina Initiative, Care and Share Food Bank, Pike’s Peak Library District, Latin American Education Foundation, and Central City Opera to name a few, will all see and hear about The Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado and know that they’ve made their important programming possible.
This in effect creates positive PR for lgbt communities by raising awareness that lgbt groups exist, thrive, and contribute. Gill is using the tools of consumerism-advertising, branding, incessant messaging, to firmly press the words and with them the idea and reality of gay and queer lives into the everyday experiences of conservative communities. It is even more ambitious work considering the locale. Colorado is not New York, it’s not California, this is not another ‘gay liberal throwing their money around’. Imagine if you will, a conservative, small town hockey mom passing out supply kits covered in Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado logos while she is volunteering with her fellow church goers at the local homeless shelter. Increasing the prevalence of the word “gay”, especially in spaces of positive association, goes far in making the word just a word. Not scary, threatening, or politically charged, just another word in our everyday.
What’s even more enjoyable is that he’s taking the disenfranchised model of non profit social service provision and made it an empowered locus of organizing for all minority groups affected by oppression. Institutional oppression, whether experienced by a gay person, a person of color, a gender queer person, a woman, an immigrant, it all derives from the same site of fear. The withholding of resources is not based on any one difference, but any difference that can be sighted in order to deny privilege to many for the sake of a few. Attention to differences among the different is a tool of oppressors, used to keep us fighting each other for scarce resources. Tim Gill provides a model of non profit funding that celebrates a common objective of equality and resource management rather than our usual fight to champion ones own oppression over another marginalized group.
To hear more about his efforts, listen on Marketplace by American Public Media.
Amen Richard.
September 5, 2008
Sorry Rich Guy…?
August 26, 2008
Mark Gill, who’s rather large in indie film, spoke during the LA Film Festival about the challenges of producing independent film in a narrowing market. Amongst the thirteen reasons he sighted as proof that indie film is just the wrong business to be in these days, number ten struck me:
“10: Movies now routinely fight with really compelling leisure alternatives that nobody in the last great era of cinema–the 1970s–even imagined: from iPods to Xboxes to Tivos to You Tubes to the radically improved behemoth that is cable television.”
This sad song echoes that of everyone over forty in Hollywood. I would be bummed if I were them too. Sure, it was way funner when you put money into a movie and made it back at the box office right away. Now we have to put more money into a film that has a much smaller change of making any back if at all when it hits viral and mobile content sites who might pay you once their “advertising” dollars come in.
Yes, it is a different business model. Indie film is really the last place I’d like to hear the lament over changing platforms. As a genre that fancies itself the last bastion of explorative, imaginative and informative cultural commentary, indie storytellers could look at the changing media market from the vantage point it provides to reach wider audiences. If one is that concerned with surpassing the “moronic, homogenized piece of lowest-common-denominator drivel” that is mass media, in order to bring singular narratives and quality storytelling to audiences, then the platform your message arrives on shouldn’t matter so much. New media technologies make informative content more tangible to the greatest number of people. It’s the messages that need to reach viewers and the voices that need to be heard, not the platform they’re seen on or the money made from their consumption.
9 Types of Internalized Patriarchal Oppression
August 25, 2008
Renee was kind enough to pass along this little gem of a blog. Did you know that there are 9 types of “lesbians”? I sure didn’t. Guess that degree in sex and gender from UCLA didn’t teach me nothin…
Given the terribly base and rather damaging aspects of the content, I’ve inquired as to the author’s motivation with this comment which I’ve left:
Frisky,
I would really like to know what you had hoped to achieve in voicing these opinions regarding lesbian sexuality? I understand you have a blog to run and content is content. I wonder at what point did you think to put down your neo-second wave flag long enough to consider how damaging it is to women on all ends of a sexuality spectrum to reinforce popular negative conceptions of lesbianism as predictable, performative, and uniform. Your sighting of these nine types of lesbians complete with celebrity examples tells us only that you have seen a few episodes of The L Word and sheds absolutely no light onto the rich theoretical discourse on sex and gender identity.
There are many problematic and off statements in your piece. But as a queer woman with multiple points of intersection across lines of gender, sexuality, I am primarily interested in understanding your motivation in generating content which reinforces such oppressive normative beliefs about female sexuality. I wonder if you notice the privilege you’ve invoked by perpetuating the primacy of heterosexuality as an institution by othering women who act outside of its constructs?
Love,
Your very own Lavender Scare
