Can Lesbians be Friends?

I have had a partner for going on fifteen years. We have a unique relationship because we have never lived together, in fact, I live in Berkeley and she lives in Oakland. We joke that our abode is huge because it has a freeway running down the middle.

The result of our living apart together arrangement is that we each have individual friends, as well as couple friends. As a couple, we sometimes also spend time with each other’s individual friends as well. The odd fact is that the great preponderance of these women friends are heterosexuals and I’m trying to reconcile the reason that this occurs.

Emotional intimacy beyond the couple relationship is necessary for healthy life. Straight women know this well. A boyfriend, husband or loving partner is great but without girlfriends life can be lacking in depth, dimension, and empathy. There is no way that one other person can fill each arising need, nor should they be expected to. I thought this was a given and that, especially child-free adults, would want to form new friendships at all points in their lives.

 For lesbians, there is no similar cultural frame of reference. I believe that, for single lesbians, the need for friendship gets subsumed by the search for lover-ship. Friends are the negative default setting to finding lovers. This is particularly true when folks are working and time is of the essence. The classic sentiment is, if the chemistry is not there, let’s just be friends.

As lesbians, we are a prickly bunch. We all share a history of unrequited love, thwarted romance and ferocious repression. The scar tissue that forms around these negative experiences, especially for us boomer-aged dykes, can be limitless and all-consuming. Our sexuality confuses the issue too. The potential complications of sexual attraction loom over every female to female relationship. And, due to women's oppression, fear of everything from a verbal slight to real, physical danger is always present in our lives.

But being real friends requires a lot more than chemistry. It involves shared interests, trust, mirroring our damaged and difficult selves in a way that requires compassion and understanding. It is not a fallback position, but one of fundamental, front-line support.

Lesbians often draw friends from their pool of ex-lovers or their non-attraction pool of potential lovers. But what about the idea of meeting new women with shared interests, more like straight women do? Does the nebulous sexual element make it any attempt at connection too threatening? Are we doomed to be constrained by this dynamic forever?

You might think that the fact I’m in a relationship would make me more desirable, you know, a safe harbor for the seeking. But I’m getting the feeling that it also makes me a waste of time, like squandering valuable infrastructure capital on a cul-de-sac instead of laying the foundation for a bridge or freeway.

The destination is critical but the journey itself is also important. Sometimes it can be helpful to look at the present through a wider lens. Life is uncertain. If the bolts break in that bridge or the cement cracks in that freeway, spending time on a restful cul-de-sac could be just what the doctor ordered. 

March for Manning and Meaning

For Transparency and Justice

With his military trial underway, Bradley Manning has become an issue of LGBT controversy around this year's 42nd Gay Pride Parade, there are more reasons now than ever to come out and march. The fact that the now established and clearly establishment-oriented Pride Committee president and board could call Manning a threat to the lives of military troops only illustrates the vast distance that our grass-roots, community organization has fallen.

Around 1970 the first Gay-ins were held in Golden Gate Park. In those years, issues like legal marriage and full participation in the military were the last things on queer minds. We were no more than a motley collection of outcasts, still classified in the mental health community as disordered, blatantly and officially discriminated against in every aspect of our lives from holding down a job, to renting an apartment, adopting a child, inheriting anything from our life-partners, being openly harrassed by police, bus-drivers, store owners as well as run of the mill bullies. We had no illusions or desire to be being given a slice of the moldy, cow-patty that was called the "American Pie" or to blandly blend into the mix of the so-called "melting pot."

In 1975, when I first participated in the event called "Gay Pride" it took place in Stern Grove in Golden Gate Park. Hardly a central location, some enterprising organizers had to arrange for local Muni buses to pick up participants in the Castro area and deliver us there. The parades of the seventies were politically focused and militant. 1978 in particular, zeroed in on two hate campaigns: Anita's Bryant the orange juice queen's anti gay rants and John Briggs' more dangerous initiative, proposition 6 which forbade any positive mention of gay people or their rights by anyone, gay or straight, working in California's schools.

Not only were men's issues treated as the only issues in Gay Liberation, men overwhelmingly outnumbered women by about 5 to 1 and the media almost exclusively photographed and interviewed them. Having said that, I should add that both television and print journalists loved the drag costumes and their coverage was predominantly of a derogatory nature.

We dykes were a small, nearly invisible minority. Since forcing women to wear shirts while men are permitted go topless is gender discrimination, breasts of all shapes and sizes abounded in our midst in those early years. Our boobs occasionally got some press but our voices were silenced.

On top of the media problems, there was also rampant sexism on the part of the vast majority of our "gay brothers."Before the first attempts at  genuine lesbian and gay unity which came at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, derision and ridicule of lesbians was commonplace. I remember quite well being verbally harrassed in the Castro for my haircut and lack of makeup. Society, along with gay male culture, worshipped a feminine beauty standard to which dyke outcasts allotted zero respect. The inferiority of women and "their" issues was a given in those days, so, as perverted, non-traditional women, we were considered beneath contempt.

Of course, this fact didn't dampen our spirits or lessen our resolve. It proved only that males were more tied into their superior position on the capitalist gravy train. Thus, in 1993, the alternative to the Gay Pride Parade, the Dyke March was born. It was a women-only event totally devoid of commercial interests and done completely without permits. It takes place the Saturday evening preceeding Gay Day.

With each passing year, the Pride March has become more of a "parade" and a "celebration" as it simultaneously deteriorates into a flashy, show-biz, commercial enterprise for liquor companies like Smirnoff and Budweiser. Performers and alcohol are the main draw, not to mention the plethora of "lgbt pride" items like T-shirts, jewelry, flags, caps,bumper stickers and anything else you can imagine became money-generators. Today, queer "pride" is just a veneer for big business.

But this year, in support of Bradley Manning, transparency, and a more just society for all, people who actually care about queer rights, repression and inequality of all kinds will have an opportunity to come out and show their rainbow stripes. It's past time to turn our parade back into a march, to fight for Manning and meaning in our struggle in the upcoming SF Pride Parade. I hope to see you in the streets on June 30th.

The Stories We Tell

I haven't been posting as much as usual. My writing continues but it has migrated to a more personal level involving poems and stories. Politically, the repression our uprising faced has caused a period of remission, a time for self-reflection and regrouping, a gathering in of forces.

This blog celebrated its two year anniversary on February 10th, 2013. Two years in the blink of an eye. I began it in a time of great change and upheaval as an attempt to support the worldwide struggle against capitalist oppression and economic inequality, not to mention the many other forms of discrimination it engenders. Yes, I know that these ideals are ridiculously high and I wish I actually possessed the power to instigate real change. 

I was also coming to terms with my diminshing rights as a worker as well as my demotion from the middle class to the working class, a status I'd tried all my working life to transcend. The dawning of awareness that this was not a personal failing but a shared predicament illustrates the way that mass social movements are born. 

Blogging is a remarkable thing, it's a kind of open diary and a chronological framework to a person's state of mind, and, through their eyes, the state of the country and the world. It produces something notable, like a time capsule, even if it is not read by many. 

The other reason I began blogging was a story I'd read in the New York Times Magazine called "Cyberspace When You're Dead," about ghosts that linger on the Internet long after their creator has passed on. As a cancer survivor, I'm acutely aware of how quickly that rug can be pulled out from beneath your feet! The idea of an online legacy is an intriguing one, an interesting and provacative way for a non-famous person to leave their mark on society.

In newsrooms, online and printed alike, personal blogs are now utilized as research material after death. Regardless of the quality or merit of the writing, they provide a window onto a person's thought process, the way they percieved their personal universe. 

As a sixty-something, lesbian woman, I am trying to make sense of my time on earth, to turn it into stories and poetry because, just like every one of us, I have a unique and compelling story to tell. My mother, who died at 48, never had this chance to look back on her life from a distance and tell her story. I know these extra years are a gift, one I don't want to squander.

Here, Queer and Becoming Visible

Just 118 years after Oscar Wilde’s arrest for sodomy, the LGBT struggle is finally being validated as a worthy cause. The news is full of LGBT issues, from a lesbian military widow being denied spousal benefits, queers being thrown out of restaurants, denied marriage venues and wedding cakes, anti-gay prom efforts in the Midwest and the Associated Press Style controversy over whether the words husband or wife should be used for same-gender couples. Even Obama refers to us with some regularity, linking Selma and Seneca Falls to Stonewall.

This is not to imply that we are winning these battles, actually, in many instances, the backlash has become stronger. Soul-numbing slights have been an expected occurrence for queers for centuries. But it takes public validation for many heterosexuals to be able to see the forest through the trees. And, as in the Black civil rights struggle, people are coming of the woodwork claiming they supported us all along. Well, they say that hindsight is 20/20 and that is definitely preferable to total blindness.

In the bad old days, as an inveterate leftist, mostly what our community faced was invisibility. Bringing up the subject of our oppression would sometimes elicit accusations of “bourgeois decadence” or in some way imply that we were diverting attention from class and racial struggles as though we didn’t occupy places in all other groups.

When a brave non-queer stood up for us, more often than not the comment would have been preceded by an “I’m straight but…” disclaimer. Even in the early gay pride parades straight folks could, more safely, employ the option of marching together as “straights for gay rights.”

But we have persisted and in the geological timeframe of historical change. Will we eventually see full equal rights in this country and perhaps even in this world? I can only live in hope. Still, we have to brace ourselves for the end game struggle. The laps directly before the finish line tend to be the most draining and exhausting of the entire race.

Challenges of Long-Term Lesbian Relationships

 A Long-Term Power Couple

Two women who gossip together, debrief on relationship issues, exchange sexual intimacies, what could be problematic about this picture? In many ways, nothing is and that’s why many lesbians get together in the first place. But the more challenging part of this equation is staying together.

Unlike places like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, in the U.S. the separation between the culture of men and the culture of women exists informally but nevertheless, serves as a divider for the men and women. The football with the boys and shopping with the girls stereotype is simply shorthand for a far wider separation that makes it easier for same-gender couples to meet, yet harder to persist in queer relationships.

Continuing to have friends is a given for heterosexual, married women. And I don’t mean only friends that are also coupled and visited with in pairs, I mean real “heart” friends. For lesbians in couples, emotional intimacy can be threatening for the life partner. There is no automatic dividing line between other women, as all of them have the potential of being seen as romantic partners. To prevent this, once coupled lesbians often engage in what I call emotional monogamy, meaning other couple friends are encouraged but new emotional intimacy is not. 

Among queer women some of the greatest wear and tear on relationships comes from the joined-at-the-hip phenomenon. This “urge to merge” is deadly to long term connections because it becomes attempting to share the totality of one’s existence tends to be deadly in a relationship. It is far healthier to bring home stories and adventures from two separate lives.. This involves cultivation of individual friends and interests; a simple thing that the majority of straight folks do automatically.

Being sexually monogamous yet emotionally non-monogamous is possible. But this feat  is more challenging for lesbians than for our straight sisters. It means being open to the kind of real friendships we had with each other before we were taught that emotional intimacy is automatically a precursor to sexual intimacy. This is debatable, but he absence of the possibility of true friendship cuts off an emotionally satisfying and healing connection to others. Friendship should not only be for teenagers, searching singles and old married ladies. Paired lesbians need friends too.

Of course, the major things that make our relationships more difficult are factors such as outright discrimination, lack of social support, denial of marriage rights, and inequality under the law, things that fall under the general umbrella of lesbian oppression. All are obstacles working against the longevity of lesbian relationships, demanding that we explore workable new alternatives.

Transgender Rights Push Us All Toward Equality

The archetypal blushing bride with her handsome groom is an anachronism in today’s society. Part of the reason for this is a newfound fluidity of roles that men and women assume in today’s world. Another component is the increased occurrence and visibility of lesbian and gay couples but the third, and arguably most powerful factor, is the coming of age of the openly transgender community.

The gender binary is dead. Now gender has become a continuum which, like that of sexual attraction, is individually perceived and defined, so much so that even putting forth the concept of transgender identity as a unilateral entity comes with inherent problems. The transgender community has traveled a great distance since the days of Christine Jorgensen when the word “transsexual” narrowly referred to a man who had specific surgery to invert his penis into a vagina, took hormones to build breasts and sometimes had surgery to minimize protruding facial features.

Now, transgenders and intersexuals (the less stigmatized term for hermaphrodites) of both female and male origin are making decisions such as whether or not to pass as one discrete gender, how much surgery to undergo and what level of homones to take. Unlike in days gone by, these decisions emanate more from an inner voice instead of outward pressure to from social norms and sanctions.

This is an important distinction. In Iran the government will pay for transgender surgery. This is not because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his chronies have a high regard for LGBT rights. In fact, Mr A. went so far as to deny the existence of lesbians and gays in Iran in a speech he gave at Columbia University. In his country, surgical gender transformation is granted for the most reactionary of reasons. Not only are cross-dressing and transgender people allowed to have reassignment surgery, they are compelled to have it. Once it has been performed all documentation of that person is changed to the new gender. For all practical purposes they can now live their lives as heterosexuals. It totally diffuses the problem by simply eliminating same-gender couples. However, a person who desires a sex change to pursue relationships with people of her/his own identity would, obviously, not qualify for gender reassignment.

The rainbow gender continuum in the United States has implications that resonate far beyond the issue of marriage into the very fabric of society. The first thing everyone is told about us, before birth, is our gender. Baby clothes come in pink and blue and, it could be argued, that all the colors of life are painted with this same brush: In our very recent past job opportunities, voting rights, inheritance rights, the right to serve on a jury, financial rights like the ability to hold a mortgage or have a credit card, all of these options and more were denied to women simply because of anatomy. Discrimination against women is not only a phenomenon of the Middle East and Africa. It is still alive and well, flourishing in the western world.

Transgender sexuality and indeterminate sexuality of all kinds, by their very definition crush stereotypes. What are we to think of a person who comes across as a mélange of gender, not quite male, and not quite female? Well, after we get past the feelings of discomfort and move beyond knee-jerk prejudice, what we think will depend solely on our connection, or lack of it, with any given individual; nothing more and nothing less.

As all shades of gender expression flower, not only is the issue of one man, one woman marriage made irrelevant. The entirety of sexism itself loses all viability. It is the transgender population that will help push us all forward into a future where each person’s individual character traits and preferences carry more weight the shape of their body parts, a new world that transcends the narrow limits of gender and could well be the culmination of the feminist dream.

Closeted in the 21st Century

It still happens and not just in junior high school. LGBT people live double lives even today. My sister called me the other night so I could watch Jodie Foster come out publicly at the Golden Globe Awards. Anderson Cooper declared his gayness just last year. If it is still difficult for actors and media people to live proudly in the open, there must be a high degree of prejudice surrounding regular folks.

I have been completely out since 1970. Saying this is not meant to toot my own horn. In many ways this decision has caused me a whole boatload of suffering from outright job loss to social ostracism. I didn't want to be a token lesbian for the world to see, but I felt that I had to be. My rationale was that if I had learned anything from past persecution such as what took place during the holocaust, it was that huge groups of people can really despise you and those same huge groups can be wrong. I didn't ask to be born on the other side of the bed, or to be Jewish for that matter, it just happened.

The queers I have met who remain closeted are good people. I am in no position to pass judgement on anyone. An African-American woman I used to work with took two full years to come out at work even though about a third of her coworkers were openly gay and experiencing no problems. It was more difficult for her to make this move because, in her culture, there tends to be more religion and less support. She is in a more vulnerable position.

 A new friend I met in an predominantly heterosexual but alternative environment is a clandestine lesbian. Her language of origin is not English and she is from another part of the world. I respect her very much but still have trouble with this decision, perhaps due to some failing of my own.

I am certainly well aware of what it is like to be openly other in a society that prizes conformity and uses ridicule and contempt as weapons to maintain it. 

I wonder how straight people will learn of our rainbow of diversity if the most introverted and frightened among us remain hidden? Don't these closeted ones realize that Audre Lourde was telling the truth when she said, "Your silence will not protect you?" And Lorde was African-American and, according to her "biomythography," "Zami: a New Spelling of My Name," openly queer since the fifties.

Perhaps my need to have everyone be living openly is a selfish analysis. I can neither assess another's life decisions nor the cost of speaking out for individuals whose experience is different from my own. The best I can do is help to create a world of, not just tolerance, but acceptance, a place beyond the sad, and outdated artifacts of guilt and shame. Until then, I'll just keep in mind that, at any given time, we all do the best we can.