Tag: LGBT

Once upon a time, way back at Forest Hills Elementary School in Lake Oswego, Oregon, we were taught about the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest.  Included in that was the Whitman Massacre by members of the Cayuse and Umatilla tribes, who blamed the Whitmans for bringing measles to them along with their religion.  I remember going to the library and reading, among other things, about the Nez Perce and how they were treated by our government.  They now have a reservation in Idaho and who usually call themselves the Nimiipuu.

Out of such things are activists born.

I became, at that moment a firm believer that people should have equal rights in the eyes of the government, that nobody should be treated as second-class citizens, or worse.

Halloween tomorrow.

Ick.

As a child I loved Halloween.  We’d go to Mrs. Silver’s house across the street and she would invite us inside and make us fresh caramel apples or popcorn balls.  Lord knows, one can’t do that anymore.

And we would go door to door around the neighborhood and get a real haul of treats.  And somewhere, later, older kids would toilet paper someone’s house or yard, which we would discover on the way to school in the morning.  I never liked the “trick” part.

Razor blades and pins and poison and just plain bad people put a stop to most of the good stuff I remember.  

As I got older, the tricks became worse and the treats were few and far between.

Sioux City businessman and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats got a surprising endorsement on Monday from Keith Ratliff, pastor of the Maple Street Missionary Baptist Church in Des Moines and president of the Iowa-Nebraska chapter of the NAACP.

Vander Plaats was the front-runner in the Republican field until former Governor Terry Branstad entered the race. Ratliff said Vander Plaats’ position on same-sex marriage rights was “an important factor” in his endorsement.

I spent the morning and afternoon trapped in my apartment as workers painted the stairwell which leads to the only exit from the building.  The paint fumes were probably consuming my brain cells.  I  sacrificed brain cells in better ways when I was younger.

I had hoped to write about an attempt to save what has come to be called McClellan Forest in West Orange, NJ on the site of land once belonging to Major General George Brinton McClellan, organizer of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War…and former Governor of New Jersey.

Whether anyone has a positive or negative opinion of McClellan is irrelevant.  What is relevant are the 250 year old trees…and the resolve the Archdiocese of Newark has to replace the forest with athletic fields to honor the current headmaster of Seton Hall Prep.

But the files I wanted have not as yet arrived from the woman from the Sierra Club who spoke about the efforts on Tuesday.

So I had to come up with something else for tonight.  Maybe the 8 by 10 glossies and maps will arrive before next Friday.

Then I realized it was October 9…one day after another anniversary of THAT day.  And I realized that Sunday is National Coming Out Day.  Maybe it is time for another progress report.

September 30, 1992:

• Mariel Hemingway appears nude on the TV show Civil Wars.
• George Brett gets 4 hits to raise his total to 3000.
• Hurricane Bonnie dissipated (a private irony).
• University mathematics professor begins transition in rural Arkansas.

It was a very difficult decision.  And at the same time, it was a very easy one.

I had an alternate title:  Frienemies with Aging.  This could be part two of a very slow-moving series:  On Aging was published March 7, 2008.

When we got home from teaching last night, and with Debbie not having to teach at City Tech this morning because classes were canceled for Rosh Hashanah, I decided to use the fact that we had no classes this morning to do something to make the place slightly more livable.

Like assemble the cat tree we had purchased online and that arrived via UPS on Wednesday.  Photos of the finished project will be interspersed among this story of pain and fatigue and just growing old.  Now I didn’t have the camera with me last night when I was stuck on the floor, so I went the extra mile for verisimilitude and got back down on the floor in order to show the view from there and during the struggle to rise up against my oppressor:  gravity.

Someone sent me an item last week about a transitioning transwoman (video at the link), a high school mathematics teacher in West Linn, OR.  On the face of it, this wasn’t a huge story, but it struck me as a huge coincidence.

Currently I have hardly slept for two days because every time I lay down, I have to cough.  The moving that is finally over apparently left my body in a run down state and I caught something on the first day of classes on Wednesday.  So I apologize if my current delirium causes any disjointedness.

Think of it as stream of unconsciousness.

We’ve been barely keeping our heads above water with the move, so I hadn’t had much time to think about what to write.

Teddy’s death hit us hard.  There’s a new school year starting…one which I would really prefer not to deal with.  A couple of avant-garde ideas almost breathed air.

But nope.  I really had not much.

In cases such as this in the past I have either written about why I was struggling to find something to write about (but that is transparent:  it’s the moving) or checked the news to see what I could find.

The news proved to be quite sad, for the most part.

There are so many ills tainting our world.  People’s inhumanity towards one another expresses itself in so many different ways.

Pick one.  Work on it.  Make it your Cause.  Commit the rest of your life to it.  Commit to bring it to an end.  Do anything you can to advance that issue, including working on other issues…so that maybe when the time comes someone might have learned enough about you and your issues that they might actually care about them as well as their own.

What?  What was that last part?  Work on other people’s issues?  Why would anyone ever do that?  Isn’t that, like, a colossal waste of time and effort?

Actually, no.  It’s how something…anything…gets accomplished.

Down here at the bottom of the issue food chain, the only way anyone is going to notice us is if we push other people forward, people who are and issues which are obscuring our existence.

So we’re still moving and certainly not in Pittsburgh with all the cool people.  Because of the moving, my brain is pretty much on the fritz as to anything momentous to write about.  There just hasn’t been enough continuous time to sit down and piece something together about the things I’d like to write about…even if I could really delineate what those items might be.

So let’s go to the news and see what we can find.

I haven’t seen any mention of this item here:  Radcliffe supports gay group with ‘generous’ donation.  Yes, the Harry Potter star is anti-homophobia and believes in the work being done by the The Trevor Project to combat teen suicide.

In a life not dominated by the desire to change the world so that it would be a better place to live, moving would be a great excuse for taking a month away news and politics and trying to spread the word.

But my life is dominated by that mission.  

So I flipped a coin to see whether I should try to wrap some new words around an idea or two or post something old.  When one gets to be as old as I am, it gets more difficult to “write something new” since one may find that almost everything has already been addressed in the past couple of decades…or the 292 diaries posted here…or the 260 poems written.  As much as I would like for people to read my old diaries, in the spirit of learning about lives they cannot conceive, I know that the past gets forgotten very easily and reading someone’s old diaries is an unlikely occurrence.

Unfortunately for me, since it meant no nap this afternoon, on the last day before the moving begins, “something new” won.

For today’s story, we will travel far afield from the typical domains of politics or science or law that have so often provoked our thinking into an often overlooked area of human relations:

To which gender do you belong?

It’s a simple question, or so common sense would tell us-either you’re male, or you’re female.

As it turns out, things aren’t quite so simple, and in today’s conversation we’ll consider this issue in a larger way. By the time we’re done, not only will we learn a thing or two about sex and gender and sexuality, we’ll also learn how to offer a community of people a level of respect that they often find difficult to obtain.