As seen in a San Francisco restaurant window, February, 2017.
[First published June 19, 2008. A little something about love.]
Fourteen years ago in July, I was on my first date with the woman who would eventually become my life partner and the mother of my children. How we first met is a lesbian cliché par excellence. No, it wasn’t on the softball field. Remember, the beloved is a femmy theater type. The other lesbian cliché. Right! A Women’s Studies class! (The colorful details surrounding that auspicious meeting are best saved for another time, or perhaps The Book, which, if I don’t just start referring to it somewhere it may never exist.) Now back to the business at hand, which is peeking in on our first date.
She was nervous; I was notorious. Oops! I can’t exaggerate. Some old chums who were witness to our initial courtship actually read this blog, and they’d set things right soon enough. Okay, it was true that she was nervous. It was her first foray back onto the gal side of the river, so to speak, after a lengthy sojourn at the guy shore, and she was a tad concerned I would question her sincerity. (Me? Lesbian Missionary Extraordinaire? Daunted by a conversion challenge? Baaaaaah.)
We had tried and failed to meet up after Minneapolis’ Pride celebration, and had agreed on the soonest possible alternative date, an outdoor screening of Tommy at a lakeside park downtown. I’m sure it was steamy-muggy outside. Not oppressively so, mind you, but insistent, in a nice Midwestern summer kind of way. Enough to put a sheen on the skin. That evening, as I recall, most of the steam came from a combination of our chemistry and the movie screen, on which Ann Margaret was having her way with a throw pillow and a truckload of baked beans (note to self — Tommy: NOT first date material).
While my thoughts were drifting to nothing more profound than whither and how to bust my first move, the beloved was thinking, “By god, I think I just found the father of my children! And he’s a she!”
25 Things I Learned at Creating Change in Philly
With thanks to comrade West Philly Mama.
2,316 words | 10 min. read
Thanks the combo of parent + full-time employed person + I’m no longer crazy enough to go without sleep, my processing speed is like that of one of those old putty-colored, 128k Macintoshes, circa the mid-1980s. So! The notes below are what I finally compiled from last weekend, i.e. the post-inaugural one, as opposed from this past weekend, i.e. the most recent one following our first week of the
bull-in-the-china-shopattempted coup d’état (and if you need any convincing on that score, read Yonatan Zunger in Medium, thank you Kelly Wickham Hurst).Last weekend I attended the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force Creating Change Conference, for work. The conference location is determined over a year in advance, and always falls on this weekend, the one following the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. They knew it would be Inaugural weekend, they knew it would be some kind of historic inauguration. Just not what kind. So it came to be that some 4,000+ LGBTQ activists and I found ourselves in Philadelphia, the birthplace of our nation, caucusing and workshopping and strategizing and networking about justice and a more perfect union, just blocks from the building in which, around 260 years earlier, dozens of other folks with much worse teeth were caucusing and debating and strategizing and networking over pretty much the same things. All this on the top-of-the-rollercoaster weekend, when our democracy began its plunge into years and years of what will surely be one of its greatest tests, if not its greatest.
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