Jill Rants and Raves

June - the month of being 'other'

This week in June has become, over the last three decades - the holiest grail for those of us who are not heterosexual. And before any of you start splurting that I'm somehow asserting differences over similarities, let me say it for you. And nowhere is this difference more pronounced and more jubilantly assertive than in my adopted home town of San Francisco, in the half gloom of the Castro Theatre during the Frameline Film Festival. It is a holy place. A cathedral. While the world swirls around outside, those of us fortunate enough to see one of the many groundbreaking documentaries in that place - about a sliver of our lives, a moment in our times, a crisis in our midst, or a hero in our making (I admit that for me only a few of the feature films I've seen match the potency of a mist clearing documentary) - the sharing of those moments with strangers sobbing beside us or laughing in uproarious recognition - are the moments when being gay, being lesbian, bisexual, queer, transgender, being other, feels like the conquering of Everest, the discovery of penicillin and a first kiss all at the same time.

And when that documentary is about an era and an enemy almost foreign to us now, just 30 years after it began to destroy the fabric and the lives of the generation which saw Harvey Milk elected as Supervisor from within their own ranks, the shock is like a cannon burst of freezing water followed by electric shock.

'We Were Here' previewed at the Castro Theatre Sunday afternoon to an audience most of whom knew at least some of the over 18,000 dead in San Francisco from AIDS during the years of the epidemic. And there were also many there for whom AIDS is just a history lesson. What shook me, as everyone silenced their cell phones and the light of the screens shooting text messages back and forth went dark, was that this community has emerged so strengthened from the epidemic and because of the epidemic, that it behooves us to see the dead as martyrs, reluctant and even ignorant of their martyrdom. Not just to a disease that confounded the medical world, a pandemic that remained ignored politically for years because the epicentre was among the hated, but because they died without knowing that by the time the disease was waning, the community would have recomposed itself, reinvented itself and reinforced itself as one of the most powerful, most organised, mobilised and well-crafted alliances, unthought of in the early days of the 70's and even the 80's as gay men and lesbians lived close by but rarely broke bread together.

I am one of those lesbians who, having come from a history of radical lesbian feminism, could not make the leap to comprehension or love until I came to San Francisco in 1987 and by then it was too late in many cases to soothe the conflicts with my gay friends in London who were beginning to die as I left the place of my political formation and sought liberation anew in gay America.

My first gay compadre to die violently, died not from AIDS, though he might have had he lived. Drew Griffiths, the founder of Gay Sweatshop Theatre Company - on the left in the photo with fellow founder Philip Howell - died in his own apartment in 1984 at the hands of a homophobic hater who, unless fate has taken karmic justice, still walks the streets a free and unknown killer. Drew was 36. By the time an early member of Gay Sweatshop, director Gerald Chapman died of AIDS at the age of 38 in 1987 and I began to see the cumulative effects of the disease in my own community, I had left London for San Francisco, leaving behind a certain detritus of failed relationships, disappointed friends, and political wreckage in the conflict between gay liberation, radical feminism and separatist lesbianism.

On one of my first visits back to London after settling in to my Bernal Heights flat with my co-worker Susie Bright and two cats, I saw across the room at the London Lesbian and Gay Centre a man who had been crucial to my emergence into theatre after I left school. Michael Richmond, a director and actor was the first openly gay man I met as I started my tentative career in stage management at the fledgling Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond early in 1972 when I was 18. Before I ever went to LAMDA (London Academy of Music And Dramatic Art) and trained in light and sound, before I ever wrote my first play in 1974, before I even knew how to hang a fresnel or cross fade a sound cue, Michael took me under his wing and gave me my first lessons in just how dependent the theatre was and is upon the gay community. 

He sat at one of the round white tables at the Centre and as I rushed to greet him, he put one hand over his mouth and pushed me away with the other. 'I have AIDS' he whispered and refused to let me touch him, even putting his hand over his mug of tea as if the steam from the liquid could somehow transfer this terrible disease to me. I hugged him over his strong objections, he turned his face from me, and we talked for a few minutes before I went to meet the friend I had arranged to see. It is never meant to be that way, but of course I never saw Michael again before his death.

So, my time alone but not alone, in the Castro Theatre on Sunday afternoon brought on a mood of contemplation and appreciation. As the list of corporate sponsors and major donors fills the screen - a reminder of the co-option of this community into the mainstream that is one of the legacies of the AIDS era - the uncomfortable thought occurs that the epidemic focused this community in a way no other enemy could. And that no enemy will ever bring us that close to destruction, to defeat, to self immolation as that one did. The modern gay community owes every bit as much to the martyrs of the AIDS years as to the heroes of Stonewall, the Mattachine Society, and Harvey Milk. The moment gay men and lesbians took to the streets and were seen to fight for life and not just lifestyle was the moment we took our rightful and long overdue place at the table. That there are many who are still trying to rip the chairs from under us on our way to that table, trying to bar us from the place we hold at the table, trying to take away what so rightly belongs to all of us is just so much more inspiration for our future generations.

As the decision nears about Prop 8 in California it is a reminder that among all the demons we have fought and will fight in the future - individual violence towards us leaving a man like Drew Griffiths slaughtered in his own home, or leaves a student like Matthew Shepard hung like a trophy on a Wyoming range, or the mob mentality which preys on the fears of many and tries to deprive us of simple basic rights - the words of abolitionist Wendell Phillips are as true today as they ever were: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

The price of the privilege of being 'other' is that we may never truly stop being vigilant.

Helen Thomas tells her truth....

Helen Thomas has been a Washington institution since the later years of the Eisenhower administration. Her place in the Press Room at the White House is iconic at the very least. Her role as the grande dame of question time will never be reprised. She has shredded glass ceilings for women journalists and has become a celebrity in her own right as she grilled Presidents over the decades.

But no-one should be fooled by the appearance of an 89 year old woman receiving cupcakes from Prez Barack Obama.

Thomas grew up in Kentucky, where the original residents probably weren't of Lebanese descent as Thomas's parents were. Presumably they arrived in a welcoming Amerika after the red faces were already assigned to the trash heap of reservations and shallow graves.

Her comments recently that Jews should get out of Palestine were a careless spillover during a casual and unguarded moment. But when asked where should they go Thomas says as if it were so simple "they should go home." When asked for just a tad of clarification she explains: "To Germany, to Poland, to America. Wherever". If she had left it with the 'American' Jews it might have been a little more agreeable. After all, few US Jews fled from an oppressive regime such as the Soviet or Fascist systems. But Helen, perhaps now might be a good time to buy that apartment building in Tripoli (it's about as muggy as DC) and leave Washington. To the Redskins.

Al and Tipper ... Congratulations!

You'd think the world had ended. You would think that the institution of marriage had been dealt a blow from which it will not easily recover ( I am rooting for that one), you'd think they had personally snubbed their collective thumbs at the rest of us, betrayed their children, lied to us for years, cheated and tricked us. Columnists are on the verge of tears, mystified by the idea that after 40 years, these two couldn't just have limped across the finish line - FOR US godammit if not for themselves. And a few have allowed themselves the naughty expression of 'How did the Clintons stay together and not the Gores?' There is talk of the 'failure' of this marriage, questions of 'what went wrong?', is there an affair in the shadows, a bad habit that Tipper finally had enough of, was she sick of sharing him with an increasingly obsessive lover called Mother Earth?

This was by ANY standards and by any measurement a phenomenally successful marriage, of two people who appeared to meet the needs of the other through some fairly major challenges - including the battles of his political life, the near death of their son after being hit by a car, and Tipper's efforts to forge an independent identity separate from her husband. They raised children, they are grandparents, they have lives still to live at 60 plus. But to hear the outrage, it is as if the 40 years are not a success but simply the prelude to failure.

I have never been much of an Al Gore fan. Doesn't matter. I have always liked Tipper's photography. She was far more interesting to me than he was. Though I was disappointed in her formation of the Parents Music Resource Center in the mid 80's when she is quoted as saying  "the change in rock music was attributable to the decay of the nuclear family in America".

Perhaps the real answer to why Tipper and Al decided to part amicably after 40 years is that simple. She started listening to all the rock music she didn't allow her kids to hear....

Bottom line - they had a phenomenal run and showed in many ways exactly what a 'successful' marriage could be. And at least, unlike most politicians, they decided to separate BEFORE having sex with someone else. Tipper and Al - I for one, salute you!

Here There and Knitting

 

A series of 8 foot high metal letters spelling out HERE on the Berkeley side of the border and THERE on the Oakland side, commissioned in 2005 as part of Berkeley’s mandated ‘public art’ component in or around eligible public building projects, has been creating a bit of a stir ever since it was erected. Even though there has been no official Oakland reaction to being the ‘THERE’ side of the boundary instead of the ‘HERE’, there’s a nagging feeling that Berkeley’s innate superiority, reflected in being ‘HERE’, is a snub to the slightly ragged more ethnically diverse Oakland.

The original call for artwork submissions, on the City’s website states:

 “In order to create a definitive entrance to the City of Berkeley, this project will utilize public art to give the City's borders a recognizable entry on the south side of Berkeley. This project will help distinguish Berkeley from neighboring cities by serving as a transition from one vicinity to the next. Artwork that is reflective of and/or involves the community and its history is encouraged. It is highly suggested that the word "Berkeley" be incorporated into the artwork. This public art project aspires to create a welcoming sense of entrance into the City of Berkeley by serving as a friendly monument to both motorists and pedestrians.”

Not sure I think the winning project met that criteria but who cares once the city’s officials could describe it as a whimsical piece with literary connotations like the Poetry Walkway downtown. Gertrude Stein, whose misused quote about Oakland ‘there is no there there’ is hinted at in this sculpture never actually disparaged her hometown but meant that she could no longer go home after discovering that her childhood home had been torn down.

Ironically, the HERE THERE sculpture is far more pleasing than the ‘official’ There! sculpture in Jack London Square by artist Roslyn Mazzili.

But finally, after years of feeling that Oakland was being insulted, Berkeley’s own version of the Tea Party decided to knit a woolen cozy to slip over the T as a protest against the sculpture. Now, Berkeley officials have decided to show their worst and most humorless face by demanding the knitters remove their woolly sheath and are threatening unspeakable acts against these domestic terror-knitters.

Personally, I think it’s another storm in a Berkeley teacup and the re-facement of the sculpture adds character at the very least to the dull original. Oakland can just sit back and laugh at their smaller northern neighbor and marvel at the amount of spare time the city has to waste.

And as for me - I would always rather be somewhere other than here….