Jill Rants and Raves

Prejudiced Towards Pride

Today is the GayLesbianBisexualTransgender Pride Parade in San Francisco (we don't call them Marches - that would be far too militant. Parades are much more benign). I don't go, but only 'cos I'm an anti-social fart who would rather hike with canines. I'm not really anti-social, actually. Friends often complain that going on a dog walk, or shopping with me, even going out for coffee or to a restaurant will lead inevitably to my engaging with someone I know, someone I don't know, or someone I might like to know. Often they have a dog. A dog I know already, don't know, or would like to know. But I'm not one for big crowds.

But, today is GLBT Day in SF. This is, in spite of the fact that we take it for granted - a bloody amazing thing. So this blog is just a reminder that we still have nations around the world who punish homosexuality with death, and idiots in every country and every city who feel that bludgeoning a queer, beating men as they come out of gay bars, and assaulting gays and lesbians verbally is an OK thing to do. 

Am I 'proud' to be a lesbian? I am defiant. I am not ashamed, that's for sure. My theatre play Any Woman Can (written in 1974) opened with the lines 'You are looking at a screaming lesbian. A raving dyke.' It is June 2007, and I have just started writing my second play  - perhaps I should call it 'Un-Defined, Un-Conformed & Un-Requited'. The main character in the first play, Ginny, will look back over her political and personal battles in the decades since she uttered those lines and through her friendship with a younger dyke see how her own personal struggle has formed the environment of today's queer culture.  One thing is for sure -  there will be a  fantastic sound track in the play. And dogs.

Speaking of music. 30 years ago, rock star Tom Robinson wrote a gay anthem which blew us all away with it's raw emotional strength. 'Glad To Be Gay' was a significant marker in our history. The same year, Tom wrote another anthem - dedicated to me - and included it on his 'Rising Free' EP. 'Right On Sister' didn't have the musical or lyrical purity of 'Glad To be Gay' or my fave of TRB's tracks 'Up Against The Wall', but when record label EMI re-issued TRB's great 1978 rock album 'Power In The Darkness', in 2004, 'Right On Sister' made it on to the collection.

The song was panned by reviewers who described it as 'strident prosletyzing' and when you Google the song it is described as a 'hamfisted tribute' to me. I don't care - I adore Tom, always have. He is one of my heroes, and he never lost sight of the fact that class, race, sexual politics, military adventurism and poverty are inextricably entwined. Tom has mellowed over the years. So have I. Though some may be surprised to hear that.  As to anthems? Bring 'em on. Here's the lyrics - raise your fists in hearty rebellion as you read this!

She's a right on sister
And she knows what she likes
She needs you and me, man
Like a fish needs a bike
Suffragette city
Don't bother her none
Cos the women's revolution
Is bound to come... and I say

Right on, sister
Right on sister, right on

She's a clear level thinker
Just look at her play
She's got it together
In most every way
The women's army is marching
And the weak shall be strong
Power to the sisters
Right on, right on... and I say

Right on, sister
Right on sister, right on

© Tom Robinson 1977

Tilden Park Tragedy

If anything, the week got worse. On Tuesday, I wrote the blog about the internet abuse of children, the disassociation of us from what happens right in front of our faces. I didn't know when I wrote it, that I had witnessed the scene of an unimaginable horror the evening before. On Monday evening, my friend Tory and I loaded my pack of dogs in my car and headed off to walk along a trail in Tilden Park. Tilden is one of a series of gorgeous open space parks running the length of the East Bay. There are magnificent vistas, lakes, streams, forests, nature trails. It is one of my special places to be - alone or with friends and my dogs, my beloved, precious dogs. We headed to the eastern part of the hill, hoping to rise above the fog, sweeping in blankets across the Bay and brushing past us in wisps, as we headed upwards, towards a place called Inspiration Point.

I looked to the left towards one of the trailheads.

A car sat, in the mists, lonely and seeming somehow out of place, in the small dirt parking lot by the beginning of the trail. On a clear day, this is a beautiful spot, and one which leads steeply and quickly down to Lake Anza, along a trail known as Mineral Springs. It was sometime before 7pm. There was a cool foggy breeze swirling and a lone police car sat nearby, lights blazing. The scene seemed wrong. But I didn't see anything. Tory and I decided to drive just a few feet further to Quarry Trail, and we could see patches of blue searching for a way to punch a hole in the fog. Our walk was beautiful. Tilden is a place of peace and wild beauty.

On the walk I heard a commotion from a short distance  - I now know this to be the arrival of emergency vehicles. And I also know that Kevin Morrissey, aged 51, had just, minutes before our arrival, shot his two beautiful girls and his wife to death before killing himself. Many who knew the Berkeley family said the man was a loving devoted Dad.
I can only think of one thing. That he drove his family to a beautiful place on a cold evening, and pulled out a 357. Magnum and shot one girl and then the other in front of their mother. Perhaps he had practised this action for weeks in his garage, or at the firing range, so that the kids' suffering would be brief, so that the daughter shot after the other would barely know before the bullet entered her head. And their mom. How does anyone look in the eyes of those he loves, and destroy them?

He wasn't angry with them. He loved them.

There is already an industry to examine and debate how a man like Morrissey reaches this point. Radio talk shows are inundated with armchair detectives and angry, outraged people who still cannot imagine a tragedy like this emerging from their root ball. The man himself left a note blaming financial woes. I don't really care why. I care that a man could reach this point. I care that Kevin Morrissey was a man who legally owned a weapon, and that he kept it in his home in Berkeley. I care that he was a military veteran, and I do wonder whether the skill to murder in sanctioned killing zones can ever fully be unlearned. I care that he had reached the conclusion that his problems were so great that his family, not just he himself, but his sweet young kids also, could not survive them.
I care that he felt, even in his undoubted distress, that as the head of this family, he had the power and the right, to snuff out laughter, tears and futures. I also care that the police car we saw contained an officer who was the first to see this slaughter. How does he cope with what he had to see?

I will walk down the trail at Mineral Springs, with Roxy, Frank, Roo, Calvin and Oscar, to the lake, so near to Inspiration Point, and remind myself that life is beautiful.

Humans - Not Always A Pretty Sight

I'm sorry. This is not pretty. You may already have read about this, seen it on TV, found it on the net, who knows. I try to avoid stuff like this. Who doesn't? We know it happens, we pretend it's happening somewhere other than close to us, and we hope we never ever have to console a child to whom this happens. There's a report that an online 'ring' which trafficked in horrific images of children, as young as a few months old, being sexually abused, raped, and assaulted, has been smashed. Worldwide, 700 suspects have been identified and 31 children found and taken into protective care. 15 of those children are in England.

What sort of creatures are we?

Yesterday in Oakland, the funeral took place of a 5 year old boy who shot himself with his step-uncle's gun - an illegally owned weapon brought into the home of the grandmother of the boy by a man once convicted of a killing. The boy was due to move to Alabama to live with his grandfather. That's another story - why a child with two living parents in Oakland would be better off living with a grandparent in another state.

Who are we?

I'm a tormented soul, I'm coming to grips with that. One of the ironies of my feeling far more content, at ease with myself as I get older is that I still can't get comfortable in the world around me. I mean, who would want to be comfortable with the above, but I sometimes get into little spats with people who are so incensed with 'Iraq', or 'the meat industry', or the 'destruction of the environment', that they don't see the drug deal on the corner, or the children being killed in the next town, or the gradual erosion of our civic  generosity towards the weak in our community. 

Someone asked me the other day why I was raising money to catch our local goat killer. Why didn't I do something more productive with the money, like giving it to a major organisation who would have the clout to do something on a national scale. The fact that the organisation he suggested was PETA (don't all choke on your scone at once) is neither here nor there. I think this is about the fact that we all feel powerless - here, in Berkeley, in Oakland, even in San Francisco - to prevent our kids, our animals, our elderly, our mentally ill, our disabled, and homeless from being cut, diced and blended - that we  re-focus our internal lenses on a problem we know we can't solve but at least don't have to feel personally responsible for.

My father used to tell an anecdote about moving back to his hometown of Berlin, some years after the Holocaust, a returning Jew to a country of Aryan defeat and foreign occupation. Germans, many of whom had voluntarily joined the Nazi party early, but who had probably played a minor role in what followed, made a point of coming up to my dad and telling him in that confidential, self aggrandizing way 'Posener...wonderful that you are back....ach, wissen sie...Hitler....schrecklich...awful man....'. Their voices would trail off. They felt better. After all, they had come clean in the confessional known as postwar Germany. My dad, when telling this story would always keep a small smile on his lips. 'Poor Hitler', he would say, to the momentary surprise of the listener. 'Poor Hitler. He had not a single friend or supporter'.

It's never us, is it? What kind of creatures are we?

Of Butch, Tattoos, Bad Habits and Dog Walks

The weather has been bloody great, the Rainbow flags are fluttering all over San Francisco, and I'm going to my consultation with a tattoo artist today. And not just to discuss content and where to re-face this billboard I call my body, but whether I can actually stand the pain and get over my needle phobia, which, trust me (and those who have seen it) is highly inflated.
So, last night I took a baby step and went to a movie at the Film Festival called 'Spider Lilies' set in Taiwan, about a lesbian tattooist and the unfolding story of the rekindling of her teenage love affair with a 9 year old girl, who years later comes to find her. There are parallel stories about a deadly earthquake, the tradition and meaning of tattoos, the loss of parents and the strong ties of family responsibility that runs through their lives. Add in the contentious topic of online brothels with underage 'webcam girls', and you have a pretty intriguing visual treat.  And I didn't look away once as needle and ink hammered away at skin. My trainer looked over at me, and said - cigarette hanging out of his mouth - 'you're as ready as you'll ever be kid'. I made that last bit up. You know that of course. No-one smokes in San Francisco.

Actually, and this is a major diversion - new laws in Britain mean that I can go to a pub next time I'm in London and eat sausage and mash without the ash from someone's ciggie floating around in the gravy. I am stoked. You wanna know what ranks among my top 3 pet peeves? People who put their cigarettes out on food plates, in coffee cups, into a bottle.....that sort of thing. That, for me, is a moment of serious stomach upheaval. And another thing. No, never mind. This isn't what I was writing about in any event.

What I'm twisting and turning around in my busy brain these days is the issue of gender, sexual identity, social constructs of same, butch femme, the damage done to the butch psyche by feminism, and especially the type of proscriptive righteous radical lesbian feminism I almost drowned in, during my twenties in London. Obviously, I have thought this through before, I'm sort of a thinker, if you hadn't worked that out. I have existed within this culture - transgressive, radical, engaged, politically astute....ya know, it isn't like I just got off the lesbian cruise yesterday, with my bananas. Right? 

But I'm sorta shocked at myself. What happens, if at my age, there is a whole new wave of understanding, of revelation, of the jigsaw puzzle seeming to slot into place in your mind, the clues lining up like evidence, right there, right in front of you. It is, as if, looking at a familiar flower or a leaf in the woods, and the colour leaps out at you, as if seeing it for the first time. I realize that 33 years after writing my first play about sexual identity, I am filled with an urgent need to write my second one.

Oh. Roo just came to the door of my study - this is a converted garage in my backyard, with a skylight and pale walls - and knocks. 'Jill, we're kinda waiting'. She clears her throat. 'Waiting for our hike'. Roo, a twelve pound mutt always takes precedence over self indulgent self-examination. This will have to wait. It is mid June, the sky is a little overcast right now. The dogs need walking, and there will be leaves to look at in the hills.

Paris Is Not In France

This might take a few twists and turns - but hey, I'm JP and I am a little tortuous, we all know that, right? I was trying to describe my brain the other day - and could only come up with an image of a Rubik Cube endlessly spinning in the hands of someone who will never, ever, be able to solve the puzzle. Rubik Cubes aren't very smart, in and of themselves, and in the hands of someone who cannot solve a mystery - well, the thought is a little like my brain. Not as smart as it seems, infinitely frustrating, mis-cuing on a regular basis.

But, aside from that detour....this thing with Paris....I'm one of those who believes that celebrities have a right to privacy from the prying eyes of the great unwashed - that's you and me. And therefore have a right to privacy from those who make an indecent living servicing the prurient needs of the great unwashed - that's the paparazzi. You don't like that everyone slowed down and rubber necked when you had that little fender bender on the freeway? You got pissed off when everyone in their smug new cars giggled after you got pulled over by Rambo motorcycle cop with the mirrored shades and his Glock hugging his side? Did you hate it when you got told off in the park for not having your dog on leash, and 5 other people started lecturing you about 'responsibility'? When your relative was arrested for DUI, when your father was fired for embezzling, when your best friend got thrown out of the ballgame for throwing a bag of chicken legs at the pitcher, when a man you worked with was picked up for exposing himself to kids in the park, and the investigators came to your place of work - did you find the prying eyes, and the tsk tsk'ing just a little bloody hard to take?

An aside here - the only one of the above that's happened to me is the offleash thing, because my dogs all vote Libertarian. Except Oscar, who is proud to say he is a registered Librarian, and I haven't the heart to correct him. I watched a documentary last night - why do I love docs so much - called 'Maxed Out' about America's love affair with debt, credit cards and bankruptcy. Nothing new there. But there was a moment when I did have a bit of light bulb go on.

Americans are rightly proud of a document called The Constitution which appears to guarantee the right of privacy.  But as the doc pointed out. That just means a certain degree of privacy guaranteed from your government. The elected government that is. You know, those people who are sent to DC after 23% of eligible voters have bothered to exercise their right to vote. The unelected government - CitiCard, Providian, TransUnion, Equifax, and MBNA offers you no right of privacy at all.

And given that MBNA - which merged with Bank Of America in 2006, becoming the biggest credit card issuer in the world - was the largest corporate contributor to BushBoy, exactly who is your government? Yup, a corporation which has the right to trawl every conceivable place to get your private info - quite quite legally.

So, what has this to do with Paris Hilton?  If, as the great unwashed maintain, she should just shut the fuck up and do the time for driving on a suspended license while on probation, I totally agree. It's a violation committed by thousands every day, who end up in cells across the country every day.

You want her to be to treated like everyone else? Then treat her like everyone else. Back the hell out of her driveway.  Privacy - it's a strange and wonderful fruit. Not many of us are able to taste it any longer.

The Birth Of A Tattoo

Many friends and lovers of mine have had tattoos. The first lesbian I knew who willingly subjected herself to the public disapproval, not to mention the edge of disdain shown by 'traditional' wearers of ink, was one of the first transgendered people I ever met, in London, in the early 70's. I knew her as Carol. And she asked to be called Carl. I'm not sure how I met Carl, and her girlfriend, who would sometimes confide in me that Carl's mood swings while taking hormones, were more dreadful than she could handle. Carl wore men's clothes - always - and was training herself to pee standing up because she felt humiliated doing it sitting down.

Yet, she seemed, with her high voice which she desperately tried to lower, and with her round baby face, a butch, just like me. I thought. At that time, over 30 years ago, not only was Carol's choice the most courageous one internally, it was one of blatant sheer cold steel courage in our world. Having said that - it troubled me. I was barely 20 and my head was filled with the revolutionary language of the newly coined battle between the sexes.  Long before I had any real understanding about gender, lesbian feminism drew a line in hard black marker about women vs men. 

Carol once pushed me up against a wall of the bathroom in a favored hangout for actors in the West End. The show I was stage managing at a nearby theatre had ended. Her girlfriend and mine were sipping cocktails at the bar. Carol's white shirt was unbuttoned, her belt buckle undone, her breasts which were strapped close to her body seemed like muscular lumps on a broad strong chest, she reeked of beer. One hand pushed me, the other grabbed me. Her face was in mine before I even realised what had happened. My stomach heaved. I felt violated.

I don't know that it was the last time I saw Carl. It certainly was the beginning of the end of our friendship, a friendship I valued, teetering as it did on either side of what was to become a sexual revolution which neither of us could foresee.

Carol had tattoos on her forearms, and she rolled her sleeves up to show them off. My other friends didn't like hanging out with her, she was the enemy in the feminist camp, the transgressor. I loved her. Didn't want her hands anywhere near my butch self, but I loved her.

So, I'm going to get the first tattoo of my life - this is of course extremely funny to those who know my needle and pain phobias. I recently got a tetanus shot and someone had to come and hold my hand. I can't be in a room when a vaccine is given to an animal. But I have never been one to bang the drum softly.

There is an urban myth - and maybe it isn't a myth - that butch lesbians in the 40's and 50's would have a nautical star tattood on their wrists, which would then be covered by a wristwatch. At night, or on the weekend, when the watch came off, the mark of identification would be a beacon in the darkened world of lesbians before Stonewall, before The Ladder, before Lyon and Martin, before Sappho meetings (for those of you in my home country!).

Whatever the truth about the star - this is what I want on my upper arm - as large as it can be (aesthetically), with the ephemera, the signifiers of my life around it - a camera hanging off one of it's points, a dog grabbing at it, the words 'family', 'butch', 'rebellion'...I dunno....I have wanted to get a tattoo for thirty years, since I first saw Carl's strong forearms. I have never felt a strong enough commitment to an image to overcome my fear and loathing of the pain involved. But just last week, Susie, my ex showed me a new tattoo on her upper arm - a simple line from Gertrude Stein. I went to bed that night, sleepless in Berkeley, and woke the next morning with a sudden determination.  Carl, wherever you are, you are one of the stars to me.