Long Time No Post

I'm not quite sure why I've been silent for more than a year. Perhaps my time as co-leader of Openhouse's Queer Elders Writing Workshop has siphoned my creative energies away from this blog.
As it happens, though, the Coronavirus pandemic has suspended the workshop and all other Openhouse group activities for the next several weeks or months in hopes of spreading out the inevitable infections to stay within our hospitals' resources. And, as a person over 60 years old, I am advised to limit my exposure to groups of people.
So, I'm mostly at home for the next while, and sharing my accumulated writings of the past year, at the very least, seems like a good use of the time.

Religious Freedom to Discriminate?

Religious Freedom to Discriminate?

For centuries, people have used the belief that homosexual behavior is a sin to force gay people into abstinence or sham marriages; to criminalize same-sex conduct and imprison, torture, and kill gay men; and to condemn lesbians as witches and kill them. In America, fortunately, laws against homosexual conduct and laws barring same-sex marriage have been found unconstitutional. Nevertheless, even now, gay teens can be sent to “Christian” facilities to be brainwashed out of their God-given sexuality, as in the movie, Boy Erased.  Some enlightened states have banned this type of “therapy,” because it doesn’t work but instead causes depression and suicide. However, there is no federal prohibition against it.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 was designed to prevent government regulations from impinging on persons’ right to the free exercise of their religion. The law provides religious adherents with exemptions from general laws, for example, to allow them to wear religious haircuts or headgear despite laws or rules against them, or to allow them to observe their own religious holidays.

However, some Christians argue that their religious liberty gives them the right to discriminate against those who don’t share their rules. Thus, religious businesspeople wouldn’t be required to provide their services to all comers, so, no wedding cake for same-sex couples, or worse, no medical care for LGBT people. Religious employers seek to avoid the ACA’s mandate to pay for contraception.

In 2017, Trump signed an executive order directing the Attorney General to provide guidance to federal agencies in interpreting this law. The clear purpose of his order is to allow entities and people regulated by federal agencies to rely on their “religious views” to discriminate against women and LGBT people. For example, religious hospitals could refuse to provide abortions or could ban same-sex spouses from visiting their sick and dying partners, and Social Security employees could refuse to process benefits for a surviving same-sex spouse.

Such regulations would be monstrous. Of course, religious groups have the right to set standards for their own adherents, but it stops there. Their free exercise of religion does not allow them to impose their standards on outsiders, nor does free exercise allow adherents of any faith to discriminate against members of another faith or to exclude Muslim immigrants from the country. It seems to me that allowing such discrimination would violate the First Amendment by establishing that brand of Christianity as the state religion. America with a state religion would be a theocracy. I don’t want to live in any theocracy, let alone one that denies my right to exist.

Technology

Technology

Most of my life, I’ve been thrilled to witness and use new means of technology. My manual typewriter became an electric one, which then became a word processor, and then a computer. Then came machines that scanned the world’s knowledge and art into digital format and made it accessible everywhere, via the World Wide Web. Any question that comes to mind can probably be answered within a few taps of a touchscreen. I can carry an entire library in my shirt pocket; telephone books have become obsolete; and I can instantly get reviews of everything from movies to restaurants to doctors.

The benefits I get from these new technologies are abundance and convenience. All the knowledge and entertainment I can imagine and more fit into my pocket and are but a few clicks and a credit card away. I’ve become so lazy that to decide if I need to wear a jacket when I leave the house, I don’t open the door to check the temperature, I open an app that tells me the current temperature in every neighborhood of San Francisco. If I’m planning to be out for several hours, I open another app that tells me how the temperature is expected to change over that time period.

My problems with the online world relate to the quality of the information there, and what is being done with information about me. We may never know how much the 2016 election was affected by the Russians’ strategic deployment of disinformation about Hillary and leaked emails stolen from the DNC to the precise voters who would be most affected by them.

None of us is immune to being fooled by fake news. A friend had to tell me that something I shared with her was a fabrication. Nowadays, when I read a quotation that seems too prescient or learn of a misdeed that seems too evil, I go to a fact-checking site to be sure I’m reading something real, before believing it and sharing it with friends.

Which brings me to my other problem with Facebook. We think we’re the customers when we use the service to communicate with our friends and the world, watch videos, shop, and read the latest news. Not so. We’re the inventory. Facebook’s actual product is information about users – what we’ve liked, who our contacts are, what we read, and what we buy. Facebook’s actual customers are the people and companies who pay them for our information, so they can slot us into precise demographics to tell us and sell us whatever they please.

It isn’t just people’s purchases and votes that are affected by these fabrications. In 2018, the largest mass-killer of Jewish people in American history was prompted by online reading of right-wing conspiracy theories about the central American caravan of migrants and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Hate speech is not just politically incorrect; it is extremely dangerous.

The internet as a technology is neutral, but it gives harmful speech vastly increased volume and reach. And pictures and words that appear on screens may seem more likely to be factual than spoken words. Let’s be careful out there. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can incite people to use assault rifles.

Pocket Watch

Pocket Watch

There was a time when I really wanted to own a pocket watch. I’d worn a wristwatch most of my adult life. I’d considered using a pendant watch or a watch that pinned to my clothing, and rejected them. Somehow I’d been enraptured by the image of a powerful, wealthy, handsome man who wore a pocket watch on the end of a gold chain, who fished it out of his pocket and clicked the button on top to flip the case open.

I eventually bought myself a pocket watch. The case is embossed with the Statue of Liberty and sailing ships in the harbor on one side, and an eagle flying in front of a mountain on the other side. I also bought a snazzy chain to connect the watch to a clip that hooks through a button hole or over my waistband.

I wore the pocket watch for a while, especially on state occasions. I felt pretty cool clicking open the case to read the time. But that gratification was outweighed by the hassle of fishing the watch out of my pocket, getting it right side up, and clicking it open to tell the time, as compared to the ease of simply turning my arm to see my wristwatch.

Nowadays, I find it even easier to press the button on the ipod touch that lives in my shirt pocket to check the time, in part because the large digital read-out is easier to read than the analog face of my smallish wristwatch.

So, since ease of use is such a strong value to me, why did I want to use a pocket watch? Somehow it acquired for me an air of sophistication, wealth, and, of course, male privilege. If I couldn’t have that privilege, at least I could have the proper accessory.

A Very Uncomfortable Time

A Very Uncomfortable Time

When I was 15 years old, I was living in Berkeley with my father and brother in a house on Grizzly Peak Boulevard. My father and I each had a bedroom on the main floor, and Eric had one downstairs, next to the laundry room.

I was woken up one school morning by my father’s alarm clock. I went into his bedroom and shut it off, noticing that his bed had not been slept in.

I found him on the living room sofa, collapsed onto the newspaper, utterly silent. I poked him in the shoulder, and found it cold and hard.

It was clear to me that he was dead, but I had no idea what to do about it. After a few moments, I hear Eric’s shower go on. I called him on the intercom, “Get up here. I need you.” And up he came.

He thought there might be some hope, and called for an ambulance. The EMTs made a show of working on Dad, and Eric went with them to the hospital.

I stood in the driveway and wondered what to do. The mother of the family across the street had heard the ambulance and came out. After I told her what had happened, she brought me into her house to await word from the hospital.

When the call came, she spoke with the hospital. I told her she didn’t need to say the words; it had been obvious. I carried in my purse an address book, and we called Dad’s brother and his ex-wife, our mother, with the news.

He had died from a drug overdose, probably accidental. A closeted gay man and a doctor, Dad had self-prescribed all manner of psychoactive drugs. Mother had told us of his drug use, without explaining why it was up to us to deal with it. We had noticed that he sometimes passed out at the dinner table or was very hard to awaken in the mornings, and that his emotions were volatile. Once he stopped talking to us for several days. But we figured that was more or less normal.

I was in the throes of a crush on one of my women teachers at the time, and I had imagined her having to tell me that my father had died, and she would take care of me.  I felt guilty when part of my fantasy came true.

Mother borrowed a truck and came to take us to live with her in Santa Monica. She was ruthless in cutting down our possessions to what would fit in the truck. I would be separated from my home, school, friends, and much of my stuff. But at least I’d spent many vacations in Santa Monica, so there was something familiar about our destination.

I remember that our first day at Santa Monica High School was April 1. I was a straight-A student, so I settled in pretty quickly. I wrote the following poem around that time. It was published in a mimeographed literary journal called The Voltaire:

Fog, all around me,

Sheltering me

From my world that was

Torn apart.

When will the sun

shine again?

I can’t see

Through the fog,

Nor do I want to see

My world that was.

I look forward

To sunshine.

Upon what

Will the sun shine?

What will I see

When it rises again?

What?

What new road

Lies ahead,

Shrouded now by fog,

which will soon be revealed?

How I Wound up in Law School

Dana Goes to Law School

I chose to major in music at U.C.L.A. because I enjoyed singing and playing guitar. My high school guidance counselor apparently assumed that my future husband would support me. During my college years, though, I discovered that I was a lesbian, I wasn’t going to have a husband, and I would need a good career of my own. I also realized that I did not want to teach music and was not likely to earn a living as a performer.

So I needed to find myself a career. I took a series of career guidance tests, which showed that I would be able to do about anything I set my mind to, and that my interests were in “verbal, persuasive activities.” This made sense, since my love of reading had endowed me with a large vocabulary, but it didn’t narrow the field very much. My brother had been a year ahead of me in school, and I had usually followed and enjoyed his choices of electives. So I followed his grad school choice, too, and applied to several law schools in the U.C. system.

My first choice was Boalt Hall, which would return me to Berkeley, where I’d enjoyed living in the mid-60s. But Boalt was everybody’s first choice, and my music degree, albeit summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, got me only as far as their waiting list. I was accepted outright at U.C. Davis, which did not appeal, and at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, which was at least close to Berkeley. Its school year started a month before the other schools, and I had to pay a non-refundable acceptance deposit immediately, so I couldn’t wait for Boalt to decide. I prepared to move to San Francisco, where I knew nobody, so my excitement was tempered with a hefty dose of trepidation.

A friend drove me and my stuff to my new home, a tiny studio apartment in a building full of law students a few blocks from Hastings.

I was a devout Christian at the time, and made a point to attend the nearest church on the first Sunday. It was a Lutheran Church, not much different from the Presbyterian church I had belonged to in Los Angeles. I was made welcome, and soon found myself singing in the choir and exploring The City with other church-goers.

Law school was far more challenging than nearly any class I’d ever taken. The only courses I’d ever had trouble with were the upper-division English class I’d taken as a high school senior and college calculus. I had always been at or near the top of my class in school, but then so had all the other members of my law school class. I had to learn better ways of note-taking, because I had to be able to read and understand the notes to study them for the final and eventually for the bar exam. I got to know a few women in my law school class, and we formed a study group. Nevertheless, my nerves frayed, and I started having anxiety attacks.

I went to student health, and the doctor prescribed Valium. This was 1974 or 5, and a prescription for “mother’s little helper” was a badge of dishonorable weakness. Looking at the vial of pills shocked me into remembering my Christian faith. I remembered that God had brought me this far and was always with me. I had a good cry, thanked God for the reminder, and got my feet under me.

I graduated from law school with honors, passed the Bar Exam, and had a nice little career in legal publishing, from which I am now happily retired.

QEWW Public Reading, September 2018

Here's the piece I read at the end of my first cycle in the Queer Elders Writing Workshop that is sponsored by Openhouse:

You Gotta Give them Hope

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay person elected to political office in California. My path intersected his in the 1978 campaign against the Briggs Initiative. In a backlash against early ordinances banning discrimination against gay people, State Senator John Briggs had authored a proposition requiring school districts in California to fire gay teachers and any teachers who advocated for gay civil rights, in the classroom or elsewhere. When early opinion was strongly in favor of the initiative, gays and our supporters mobilized against it.

At the time, I was an officer in the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, a San Francisco coalition of gay rights activists within various religious communities – Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, Jewish. We visited congregations and held services to counter the ignorance and invective that were being used by proponents of the initiative. Harvey Milk and Sally Gearhart were debating Senator Briggs. The No on 6 Campaign, the Bay Area Committee Against the Briggs Initiative, and similar groups all over the state joined the fray.

And we won. On November 7, 1978, Prop. 6 went down in flames, roughly 60% to 40%. And we celebrated. And there was backlash.

I was working for the California appellate court on November 27 that year. My desk was in a large room with windows overlooking the San Francisco City Hall. Somebody noticed a fleet of police cars converging on City Hall, and most of us watched for a while and wondered what was happening.

Eventually we learned that former Supervisor Dan White had brought a gun into City Hall and had killed Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Gay and straight, most of the city was in mourning. I joined a candlelight vigil outside City Hall that night, and lessened my grief by sharing it with friends.

Harvey had been a member of my synagogue, and I attended his memorial service. Eerily prescient, he had recorded a testament to be played in the event of his assassination. It included the line, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” A bullet did kill him, and nobody should lurk in a closet ever again.