What Will We Do When We're No Longer Outsiders?

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Death and Art Propel Big Questions This Weekend

At the funeral of our neighbor Megan of blessed memory earlier today, bookmarks-as-mementos sat next to the guestbook. One of them featured a girlhood photo of Megan and a quote: "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." -- Wayne Dyer

The quotation reminded me of some insights shared with me earlier this weekend, and how I might change the way I look at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identity.

Last night, with our friends David & Gerard, I attended a lecture by Jonathan Katz, the co-curator of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. Most of the works he featured in his slideshow included metaphors and symbols and codes that were dense and tense and rich for eyes that could recognize the homosexual subtext of them; in a number of cases, Jonathan Katz decoded them for us, as a number of them were subtle.

As I watched and listened, I was touched by the artists' ability to make visible to any degree a segment of society that between 1898 and 1991, and even still, today, depending on where in the world we live, typically was marginalized, stigmatized or at the very least, in the shadows.

During the Q&A afterward, I asked, "What happens when LGBT artists are no longer outsiders?"

Jonathan Katz said, "Other differences will emerge....It will not be central to their themes."

I was shaken by this answer. And I told David and Gerard so after walking through the exhibit together.

Gerard: "He was saying something hopeful, I thought, like that even heterosexual artists might include us as subjects and we'd just be more visible."

Me: "Maybe I'm too literal, but I don't ever want to be lesbian just incidentally. It's part of my core identity."

David: "I'm literal, too, but maybe assimilation's not so bad. I mean, isn't it nice being married now?" (He meant, he to Gerard and me, to Pat.)

"Yes, *so* nice. Your use of the word 'assimilation' helps me a bit because it reminds me of some alarmist Jews in my community who say that Jews will disappear if we assimilate too much, and yet, we've been here for 3,000+ years. I don't really think we're gonna disappear, since we've hung on for this long."

Dance? No, Lurk Around the Margins.

We said goodbye, since I was ready to go home, while they wanted to linger at the exhibit a bit longer. Making my way toward the exit, I found a free dance party on the third floor of the museum.

Oh, the music was so good with Rhianna's voice bouncing off the paintings in the nice and dim, cavernous room. I was nearly ready to enter the dance floor and move alone among the crowd, which likely would have been fine had I not been too shy.

I wished that Pat were with me, so that I'd have a partner. It struck me that no one would even notice us; in fact, we might stand out more so for being older than most of the crowd, rather than for being a same-sex couple -- to Jonathan Katz's earlier point. After "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics played, I slunk away to my car in the parking lot. When that song was first popular, I was most of the dancers' ages, and I just owned a bicycle and a subway pass, and a radio/tape-deck I got as a premium for opening a bank account.

Driving home, I thought, Oh, no! Have I become like the lesbian separatists who used to alienate me when I was first getting involved in the gay community in the late-'80s? Who thought that "womyn"-only spaces were supreme while I thought they were unappealing and even obsolete as a group due to their insularity?

There's an analogy, right? AIDS and other societal realities made lesbian separatism untenable back then, just like today, staunchly gay, lesbian, bi or transpeople were misguided whenever we ghetto-ized ourselves, smothering ourselves with an insecurity blanket; more and more polls showed that younger people weren't half as discriminatory as previous generations, so why did any of us hang on so fiercely to separateness and outsider status?

Still, the chip on my shoulder had become comfy after all these years of hauling it and the prospect of heeding Wayne Dyer's/Megan's advice to change my thinking was scary. Earlier today, I spoke with a heterosexual relative, to tell her of my new confusion around my identity, and of my fear of losing my minority status and as usual, she had great on-the-spot wisdom in response:

Sarah, you don't have to be ghetto-ized or Marrano-like anymore [in this area of the world]. And compared to Jews, I think there's less of a chance of LGBT assimilation causing the end of LGBT people, since you won't intermarry.... And in any case, don't worry that you'll lose your identity when people stop being hateful, as there will always be hateful people; there are persistent taboos in every stripe, like unwed mothers. There's always someone who will make sex dirty.... Sex is the engine for intrigue and betrayal and murder and art and politics.... Your sort of desire won't disappear just because it's more so accepted. It will simply be less underground, which should be good, right?

We Are All Outsiders.

In 1998, two years after Pat & I moved in to our neighborhood, Megan, Steve and their young son Ben moved in three houses down from us. I never brought them a house-warming gift, or any food or drink. Never invited them over. Promptly forgot their names as soon as Megan introduced her family and herself to us one day in the street. Thereafter, Megan would drive by us while we were raking leaves or gardening and would always wave. Whenever she had her car-window down, she'd address us by name, and I always felt bad that I had to try to stretch "Hi" into a multi-syllable word, since I was too embarrassed to ask Megan to tell me her name again.

Every time she passed us, she smiled whole-heartedly at us, but after all, what did we have in common with a woman who had a husband and a young kid? So why bother to be friendlier and learn more about her by talking with her? When other neighbors with whom we've been friendly since we've moved in, called to tell us of Megan's sudden death from a massive heart attack the other night, first, I was relieved and ashamed finally to know her name, but then realized that I'd lost the chance of ever being friendlier with her.

What did we have in common? Through loving eulogies from her husband, son, brother and best friends, I learned what I never bothered to find out from her while she was alive: One of only two other families in the neighborhood (that I know of), Megan's family and she were Jewishly-affiliated, attending High Holiday services and bar mitzah'ing their son, who was now 18 -- our nephew and niece's age...like Pat & me, originally, Meg & Steve spotted each other across a room...like part of Pat's heritage, Meg's was French-Canadian...and volunteered from the early days, helping PWA's (People with AIDS), and so likely saw a number of friends die over the early years, like we did. And probably, we'll never discover how much more we might have had in common. It's just ironic, and tragic, how I was so busy, being shy of a stereotypically nuclear family, that I didn't stop to consider that Megan and her family felt like outsiders in the neighborhood initially, which we could have softened by being friendlier.

The other bookmark-as-memento that sat next to Megan's funeral-guestbook had an adult photo of Megan, smiling the smile I recognized, and the quote associated with it came from the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke: "This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess."

Girl Scout Cookies and the Neighbors

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Due at Lunchtime

Every day that we live in this lovely house in this sweet neighborhood is a blessing. This morning, on our walk, a black van slowed down across the street and our neighbor Thea announced, "The Girl Scout cookies are in. We'll bring them over around lunch-time."

I don't eat refined sugar anymore -- not since understanding my allergy to it by 1990 -- but we bought a ton of boxes to be good neighbors. Pat'll probably bring most of them to the Soup Kitchen with her on Thursday.

This is the same neighbor who gave us surplus zucchini, basil and tomatoes from her garden last year, and who brought over a scratching-post that her family no longer needed since their cat died. The girls love it.

Around us, everyone's a good neighbor. We're fortunate. And it's a neighborhood full of families who are Chinese and Indian immigrants, biracial, black, white, older and younger. It's odd -- or not -- that when we lived in St. Charles, Illinois, everyone looked the same in our neighborhood and it was much less warm. Does everyone feel more like an ambassador of his or her people in this neighborhood, and so everyone tries harder to be kind? Or are we just randomly lucky?

Trying to Let Evening Come

The postings on this site ares my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Having Gone Into The Woods Together...

I just spoke with my relative and she said that I could write here about her experience specifically:

My own 82-year-old mother had breast cancer while I was away; had a lumpectomy with a core biopsy, which showed no further cancer; and now is getting ready, perhaps, to fight cancer's return. In fact, when she agreed that I could name her specifically, my mother said:

"Ask the people who read your blog if they have any experience with someone who's much older, doing radiation or taking the medicine -- Kathy [my sister, who survived breast cancer herself in the past year and a half] will know what the medication's called."

I called Kathy and she said that it's called either Tamoxifen or Arimidex.

"Also," my mother said, "Ask them if any of their elderly relatives were asked to do genetic testing."

When I mentioned that to Kathy, she said, "If Mom had talked to me about it, I'd have told her that it's a good idea for her other daughters; I did it for you and Deb and learned that I'm negative for BRCA1 and BRCA2. That doesn't mean that Mom's negative and she should find out because then you and Deb could make informed decisions. When women find out that their immediate relatives are positive, they sometimes opt to take radical prevention measures."

"Like lopping off their breasts, right?"

"Right, and having an oophorectomy because it's a huge predictor of ovarian cancer, too."

Caryn Lesnoy, my middle-school friend, is buried next to my father; Caryn developed ovarian cancer in high school....I should go visit my dad's grave, now that I'm back in the country. It has been awhile....

I Can't Bear Losing Her

My mother is elemental. My mother is essential. I think I love to swim because of how I'm reminded of swimming around inside my mother pre-birth.

"Will I even be around for five more years to take the medicine?" my mother asked the doctor.

"God," he replied, "could take you sooner."

"'Take me where?' I should have asked him," she said.

I laughed and we hung up shortly after, and Pat and I went to Shabbat services. At shul, I saw a poem in our new siddur (prayerbook), by Jane Kenyon, "Let Evening Come."

The best lines made my Adam's apple swell and put tears in my eyes: "Let it come, as it will, and don't be afraid./ God does not leave us/ comfortless, so let evening come."

Several years ago, Pat took me to see "Into the Woods" on Broadway. I'm pretty sure that I've written about it before, and how I loved these lines from "No One Is Alone; last time, though, I was referring to how my father necessarily had to leave me "halfway through the wood" due to his death from bile-duct cancer at 56:

Mother cannot guide you.
Now you're on your own....
Still, you're not alone.
No one is alone. Truly.
No one is alone.
Sometimes people leave you.
Halfway through the wood...
But no one is alone.

Comfort by God

Twenty minutes ago, the phone rang. It was our neighbor, Sam. "Are you busy?"

"For you, Sam, no," I said.

He laughed and said, "Well, your old neighbor's here and wants to come say hi."

Sam told me who it was and I said, "Of course," and then called down to Pat, who was watching a football marathon, and we answered the door moments later.

Our former neighbor, who we hadn't seen for nearly a decade, since his distant move with his wife and then teenaged kids, wanted to catch up on how his family was and how we were. "You'll see my face more often, since my parents are still nearby and my dad's got Alzheimer's now."

I wouldn't wish Alzheimer's on anyone, but I do feel like Jane Kenyon is right, and that, "God does not leave us comfortless," that is, just as evening had come, literally, and I was busying myself, blogging here about my sick mother, a face from healthier times arrived to share his trial with his dad. Stephen Sondheim's right, too, "...no one is alone."