And so I begin the new year by coming out of a period of silence.

A silence, to be sure, less profound than the one I inhabited this time last year.  And for different reasons.  In the last month or so, mainly I’ve just needed a break.

1. The cave

But on New Year’s Day 2009, I was living in a kind of emotional cave, with no desire or wherewithal to communicate with anyone outside my day-to-day life except immediate family.  Especially my dad, who I’d learned just a couple of weeks before had been diagnosed with a terminal lymphoma. That news came on top of stuff I’d already been struggling with for some months, after my then-partner, Rozz who is now Ptery, made the decision while in school in Seattle to transition as a female-to-male (FTM) transsexual, & made accompanying decisions that have essentially ended our partnership as-it-was.

Thus, the cave, about which I wrote on April 2, a few days after coming out of it,

I seem to be have come out of the cave now. Not just feeling better — I’ve felt better a number of times (only to then go back into the grey again) — but actually able & willing to communicate. Maybe it was that I’m finally accepting the inevitable with my partner. Maybe it was finally getting the plane tickets bought to fly down in late April to see my dad. Maybe it was taking enough 5-HTP to keep the serotonin cooking in my brain. Maybe it’s the light coming into the days after a looooooong winter. Maybe it’s all just been perimenopause. Anyway… seems I’m back in the world again.

Now, before I go on, let me explain: this post isn’t just about the history of what I did or experienced in 2009: it’s also about what it meant.  Or, better yet, the meanings I’ve made of it — because that’s what it’s all about, for me — the story, the stories each of us make of our lives.  And this is my blog, of course, so this is my damn story.

And the story of coming out of the cave also has these meanings attached to it:

(1) The cave itself became a new term, describing a new form, of that rather large aspect of my life popularly known as depression (or, sometimes, despair): along with the grey, along with the pit, along with limbo — all of which are described in my late 2006 post The grey — the newly-discovered environment of the cave can include any one of the first three, or exclude all of them; it is chiefly characterized by that deep inability & lack of motivation to communicate.  Big whooptie, a new term — but I do find the language useful in understanding myself around this stuff.  Since, hey, halfway through my life give-or-take, I don’t see the depression/despair gunk suddenly evaporating from my life.  It’s a part of who I am.  I’m just lots better at handling it than before, & part of that is in refining my understanding of how it works in me.

(2) If I were to mark the exact date the cave walls dissolved around me, it would probably be March 30, 2009, which coincided with some important phone calls with Ptery, & also with my brother Mark & I buying our tickets to Spokane to see our dad for what we both understood would probably be the last time this side of our own deaths.  And also on that day, I wrote a lengthy post in memorial to Nicholas Hughes, a fisheries biologist formerly at University of Alaska Fairbanks who had taken his own life the previous week.  I hadn’t known him, but he was the son of the poets Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, & Plath especially had been an significant figure in my life.  Not for the right reasons, initially — but the post explains that: it was my effort to honor Mr. Hughes not as mere adjunct to his famous parents’ biographies — as many of the news accounts of his death seemed to view him — but for who he himself was & for what he brought to all the people in his life, who were mourning him that day.

(3) My dad knew I’d been having a hard time. He was at peace with his own approaching death, & wanted us to be too.  But beyond that, he wanted our happiness.  He was so glad when he heard I’d come out of the cave.  That was one of the very best things about it.

2. Lima beans against WAR

Wow, after the Summer of Hate experienced by the Anchorage LGBT & allied community over Anchorage Ordinance 2009-64, one almost forgets its political prelude, when then-Gov. Sarah Palin named Wayne Anthony Ross — widely known by his license-plate acronym as WAR — to succeed the disgraced Talis Colberg as Alaska’s Attorney General.  Alaska’s top LGBT blog Bent Alaska informs us that its post about WAR, “Palin’s AG Pick Called Gays “Degenerates” (3/29/09), was one of its two 2009 posts to go viral — & that was even before he compared gays to lima beans, a vegetable that he “hates” but still claimed he could represent if he were, say, the lawyer for “United Vegetable Growers.”  We lima beans were, needless to say, not favorably impressed.

Ross also had a history of biased & even misogynistic attitudes in relation to domestic violence, sexual assault, & violence against women; hostility to Alaska Native sovereignty & subsistence rights; a mediocre reputation as a practitioner of law amongst his fellow members of the Alaska Bar Association; & a pretty shaky attitude about executive branch ethics.  Bad news all around: it motivated me to spend a considerable amount of time & energy researching him, listening to legislative confirmation hearings, & writing a very long letter to legislators, which I posted on my blog — thus embarking upon a part-time career as an occasional political blogger.  I wrote a few other posts about WAR, & commented on other sites’ coverage of him (especially Bent Alaska), & celebrated with most of the rest of Alaska when the Alaska Legislature rejected him by a vote of 23 yeas to 35 nays — an unprecedented rejection of a governor’s cabinet pick.

It took a day or two for the Alaska Department of Law to remove WAR from its website. This screenshot was taken on April 16. The red X is mine.

3. Dad

I flew to Spokane with my brother Mark in late April to visit Dad.  We also saw my sister Mer & brother-in-law Julius, with whom my Dad lived, and my brother Dave drove over from Montana.  Ptery hitchhiked up, at my request, so I got to see him too.

Dad was so happy to have all of us there. He had a lot of energy too, considering how ill he was; but near the end, as we began to return to our homes, he took a turn for the worse, as if he’d been holding to life so that he could see us all before he left us to be with Mom.  She had died in November 2005.

I took this picture during that trip: Dad telling one of his wonderful stories about growing up in the lumber camps of eastern Oregon in the 1920s where Grandpa Claude ran locomotives on the Sumpter Valley Railroad for the Oregon Lumber Company; or about the bootleg operation he & his pals in the Army Air Corps had in England during WWII; or about how he met my mom when he was looking for a job, & guy at Ellingson Lumber Company suggested he head to Izee because the camp cook there had two beautiful daughters. It was the younger of the two daughters, my Auntie Pat, who actually introduced my parents after Dad gave her a ride into John Day, where Mom was then working.

That photo on the wall behind Dad was his favorite picture of Mom, taken by a professional photographer shortly before they met. When I look at this photo, I feel his yearning to be with her again.

I last saw him on April 29.  He died not quite a month later, on May 27.  My sister was with him.

I’ve been at peace about Dad’s death almost from the beginning, partly because the peace he himself had about it put me at peace, & partly because of what for lack of better words I will call the messages that came, three of them — two of them to other family members, & the last one to me. My message was from my mother, in the form of sunflowers.  It told me that Dad was with her, & they are both okay.

On July 12, as many family members as could make it, including me & my sister & brothers, all gathered together in Spokane to remember Mom & Dad & to celebrate all that they gave us.

I love you, Mom & Dad.

4. Anchorage Ordinance 2009-64

The Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO 2009-64 was introduced in the Anchorage Assembly on May 12, & thus was my career as an occasional political blogger made much less occasional.

AO 64 would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of personal characteristics in Title 5, Anchorage’s equal rights code, which prohibits discrimination based on those characteristics in employment, housing, financial practices, education, and practices of the Municipality of Anchorage. The summer of 2009 in Anchorage featured a protracted period of public testimony at the Anchorage Assembly, with accompanying sign-waving and letter-writing both by ordinance supporters and those who opposed equal rights — led in particular by Jerry Prevo of the Anchorage Baptist Temple, who used “perverted” and other hate-terms to describe LGBT people, hence the name given the summer by commentator at the Anchorage Press: the Summer of Hate.

Identity Reports (1989) and One in 10 (1986)

From May to September, I wrote in the area of 60 posts about the ordinance, including a number that delved into the background & prevarications of its most vociferous opponent, Jerry Prevo.  I also testified in support of the ordinance on June 16 ( the second of five nights of public testimony). My testimony was based on two major research efforts in the 1980s for Identity, Inc. in which we documented the rampant discrimination in Anchorage & in Alaska based on sexual orientation. (Our research unfortunately did not cover discrimination on the basis of gender identity, which we knew little about at the time.)

The ordinance passed the Anchorage Assembly on August 11, 2009, but was vetoed the following week by Mayor Dan Sullivan — the third time in Anchorage history that equal protection for at least some LGBTQ people in Anchorage was first granted, & then stripped away again.

We weren’t real happy.

5. Friends & allies

The Summer of Hate wasn’t all hate & horror.  There was also some really cool stuff.

Cool stuff was people like Vic Fischer, Jane Angvik, & Arliss Sturgulewski testifying for the ordinance — people with just a teensy bit more credibility than, say, self-declared homophobic Bible-thumping Nazi “rascist” Eddie Burke.

Cool stuff was the huge number of people who turned out on the lawn of the Loussac Library to dance, blow bubbles, & hold signs upholding equal rights for all. The second week of public testimony, on which testimony was heard on two successive nights (June 16-17), was also the run-up to PrideFest, & every time I stepped out of the Assembly chambers for a breather, I felt like PrideFest was already in progress (once, that is, I got past the ABT redshirts & their hot dog tables).

I remember going out there one day & seeing how everyone — members of the LGBT community, & lots of non-LGBT folks including my nephew Miles & some of his friends — was celebrating equality & love for their fellow human beings, as sour-faced, red-shirted opponents stood nearby with their preprinted “Truth is Not Hate” signs agitating against equality.  I thought to myself, I’m so proud of my people — & I found myself for the first time consciously including in my people not just other LGBT people, but all the numerous non-LGBT allies who took it for granted that equality meant all of us.  And were as dumbfounded as we were at the “Truth is Not Hate” hate speech dropping out of the mouths of red-shirts both inside & outside the Assembly chambers.

On a personal level, I was lucky to make some new friendships.  John & Heather Aronno, both now of Alaska Commons, who I met a few days before the first public hearing, became my favorite folks to sit next to at Assembly public hearings: three bloggers, all in a row.

One of my other favorite new people was (& is) Janson Jones, whose fantastic photography at Floridana Alaskiana v2.5 (including of the ordinance battle) first drew my attention. He’s also an all-around cool guy who also became a new dad over the summer — & his photos of his precious daughter Aurelia are pretty wonderful too.

Thanks to the ordinance battle, I also got reaquainted with a friend from way back, Linda Kellen Biegel of Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis, who I hadn’t seen in years. I’d known Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska through email, but not until this summer did I meet him in person. I’ve known M.E. Rider of Grrlzlist, E. Ross of Bent Alaska, & longtime activist (& maker of Equality Works buttons) Stef Gingrich for years, though it was only through the summer that we saw much of each other, since normally — yes, true story — I’m pretty much a hermit.

It was the ordinance that brought me out, for ill & for good. Despite the ordinance’s eventual fate — for me personally, thanks to people like these, it was mostly for good.

6. Palinesque

Somewhere in the middle of this was Sarah Palin’s announcement on July 3 that she would be resigning her position as Governor of Alaska.  I don’t blog that much about Palin — there are other Alaska bloggers who cover her quite thoroughly (thank goodness!) — but within a few days after her announcement, I got fed up with how the national mainstream media was uncritically passing along what I dubbed the 2 million dollar meme: Palin’s claim that $2,000,000 taxpayer (or rather, oil revenue dollars — this is Alaska, after all) had been spent on responding to ethical complaints against her. So I started taking it apart, & continued to do so over at total of six blog posts.

Wow did that raise traffic on my blog. I got nearly 1,800 hits on the first post of the series the first day after it was published; to date it’s gotten 5,530 hits, making it the most read post on my blog.  The pie chart I created for that post also proved to be pretty popular.

My stuff didn’t stop Palin from repeating her lie; but then, who expected that it would?  I’m no fool.  I just hoped the damn mainstream media would wake up & do the job they’re paid to do — so that bloggers like me wouldn’t have to do it for free. I am proud to say that my efforts, which Anchorage Daily News reporter Sean Cockerham picked up on, contributed to Linda Perez of the Governor’s Office being forced to admit there were errors in the hokey spreadsheet the Governor’s Office had cooked up in an incompetent attempt to back up Gov. Palinocchio’s claim.  Cockerham’s story (posted, as far as I know, only on the ADN’s Politics blog, but not as a full-fledged ADN story) said that Perez was going to follow up on further questions he’d brought up — I’ve seen no sign that she ever did, or that ADN itself cared.  I didn’t follow up further myself because by time Perez ‘fessed up as much as she did, I was in Spokane with my family remembering my mom & dad.  I have a feeling everyone who had actual responsibility (because, of course, they were more than mere “community organizers”) decided to drop it.  Gee. I wonder why.

7. I got a new couch

More properly, it’s a futon loveseat. Whatever.  I got it in August, & I’ve been vegging more happily (when I vege) ever since.  My cat loves it too.

8. An effort to up-end the Alaska Judicial Council

Other things were going on in my life too, of course.  But the political stuff stands out, because political blogging is not my great purpose in life — writing my own stuff is. And yet, I kept doing it.

And so it happens that in late August I learned of a lawsuit by which certain Alaska conservatives, most if not all of whom have ties to the so-called right-to-life movement, had filed suit nearly two months before — a fact not covered at all by Alaska’s mainstream media in spite of all of them having received the press release when the suit was filed — which would, if successful, overturn major provisions of the Alaska Constitution with regard to the selection & retention of state court judges. The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, James Bopp, Jr., is a big name: he has litigated similar issues elsewhere.  My own feeling is that this guy is more likely to have shopped around for the Alaskans who could be named as plaintiffs in this case, than that the plaintiffs shopped around for him.  His agenda appears to be a nationwide effort to politicize judicial selection, so that candidates can be selected through popular vote based on litmus test questions on hot-button issues (“What is your opinion on abortion?” — “What is your opinion on same-sex marriage?”), instead of being selected for their judicial integrity & knowledge of the law.

Through my job on staff of the Justice Center at University of Alaska Anchorage, which I’ve held since 1990, I’d become very familiar with Alaska’s judicial merit selection process, & have a lot of respect for it too, & for the quality of judges we have in this state.  Not perfect — but a helluva lot better than in states that have the politicized & often politically corrupt types of selection processes that Bopp seems to prefer.

So, I read about Miller v. Carpeneti, & I wrote about it, & I even took a day off work to attend the hearing before Judge John W. Sedwick in the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska on September 11.   I’m not a lawyer, but I read through most of the briefings, & it didn’t seem to me that Bopp’s arguments held much water.  Judge Sedwick apparently agreed: he heard arguments from both sides & then dismissed the case. His opinion was published on September 15.

But we haven’t heard the last from Mr. Bopp: he’s appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, last I heard, the last briefs in the case must be filed no later than February 10, 2010. Oral arguments might then follow.  If Bopp fails at the Ninth Circuit, there’s every possibility he might appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court — he’s argued before them before, & won.

Meanwhile, I continue to wonder what in hell is wrong with the Alaska mainstream media, including our supposed paper-of-record, the Anchorage Daily News. First they all failed to follow up any further on Palin’s spreadsheet-of-hooey in support of her 2 million dollar meme-of-hooey; now it turns out they sat for nearly two months on a press release issued in early July about a lawsuit that could theoretically undermine our state constitution with regard to judicial selection.  Phil Munger at Progressive Alaska has drawn attention to numerous other instances in which the press has sat on its duff instead of investigating & reporting stuff that in some cases is right in front of their faces — for instance, the numerous lies propounded throughout Palin’s putative “memoir,” which the ADN has yet to write any review on.  What else are they sitting on?  How are we to have democracy that way, if the MSM isn’t doing its job?

Oh yeah, I remember now.  Bloggers like me are supposed to do that job nowadays.  In our spare time.  For free.

(All due respect to those reporters who as far as I can tell are doing their best to do their job — but are being shut down by management. I know you guys are out there.)

9. True Diversity Dinner

In the aftermath of Sullivan’s veto of AO 64, several of us bloggers who had been heavily involved in writing about it started talking about what we might do keep the flame alive.  Several of us met at lunchtime one day, & out of someone’s suggestion — I don’t remember whose — next thing you know, the True Diversity Dinner was born.  Its immediate impetus was that the upcoming Mayor’s Diversity Dinner, an event originally created during the administration of Mayor, now Senator, Mark Begich, had been renamed Mayor’s Unity Dinner by Mayor Dan Sullivan — the same guy who had just vetoed equal rights for Anchorage’s lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transfolk.

Instead of protesting, we decided to celebrate the rich diversity that the Mayor’s renaming of the dinner seemed designed to whitewash away. The True Diversity Dinner was our alternative, with the motto, “Because we all deserve a seat at the table.”  It was organized by the bloggers of Alaska Commons, Anchorage Won’t Discriminate, Bent Alaska, Floridana Alaskiana v2.5, Grrlzlist Alaska, Henkimaa, and SOSanchorage.net — but especially by John & Heather Aronno (Alaska Commons & SOSAnchorage.net), who I fear fell far behind in their studies thanks to the dinner.

But it was well worth it, right guys?  It was a tremendous event, with great speakers including my Assembly person Elvi Gray-Jackson, former Congressional candidate & longtime activist for Alaska Native rights Diane Benson, Rev. Marquita Pierre of the Center for Spiritual Healing, & radio host & blogger Shannyn Moore.

On top of that, I was honored to be the recipient of a True Diversity Award for Excellence in Online Media for coverage on my blog of the battle for the Anchorage equal rights ordinance.  Booyah!

10. Hilton workers

And more occasional politics.

When the True Diversity Dinner was first thought up, I hadn’t known that Mayor Sullivan’s Unity Dinner was booked for the Hilton Anchorage Hotel — which was (& still is) under boycott by its workers due to the bad faith practices of its management on orders of the Hilton’s owners, Kentucky-based Columbia Sussex Corporation.  A blog post by Shannyn Moore brought my attention to the fact that the Mayor’s Unity Dinner was also a union-busting dinner. I spent some time researching & writing about the labor dispute, & also attended the Hotel Workers Rising March from the Sheraton (which is now also under boycott due to similar management abuses of workers) to the Hilton two days after the True Diversity Dinner was held.

11. But I’m really about writing my own stuff, & that’s what I need to do now

I’d like to follow up on the hotel workers struggle, both at the Hilton & now the Sheraton.  I hope someone will.  But I can’t.  Here’s the deal.  There are people on this planet, there are people in this state, who thrive on political blogging, & what’s more excel at it.  I think I’m pretty damn good at it when I’m doing it — but I don’t thrive on it.  I start with enthusiasm, but over time… I wear down, my spirit flags, & pretty soon it winds right back into what I started this post with: depression & despair.

Midyear, in the post in which I claimed to be an occasional political blogger, I wrote,

The main reason I set up this site & blog was to help me get back into the flow of writing, of living my life as a writer.  And while writing about politics is writing — well, it’s not my writing, the stuff close to my heart.  Besides, I also work a full-time job.

Besides, sometimes the political stuff can really whack me out….

Another factor about how I handle political posts is that my style isn’t really amenable to fast-response writing, which is a feature of a lot of the best political bloggers I read.  But me, I like to think a lot about what I’m writing.  I like to go deep.  I like to be thorough & as comprehensive as I can.  I like to source all my references thoroughly.  I like — apparently — to write term papers.  (I sure never thought so when I was in college).  And that takes a long time.  Especially since, as previously mentioned, I work a full-time job.  And I also need a certain amount of down time or I am liable to put myself into a depression.

Sometimes, writing my own stuff actually feels like down time.  Reason: I said it above, it’s stuff that close to my heart.

So October saw me returning to writing — at that time, mostly background stuff or responses to stuff that I was reading in preparation for National Novel Writing Month 2009 (NaNoWriMo).  In looking back, I remember that True Diversity Dinner month — that is, September — also saw a bit of focus on writing: a couple of politically-oriented pieces about homophobia in science fiction, including one involving a publication I was writing a story for.  As it happened, I wasn’t far enough along on that story to meet the submission deadline of September 30 — so I picked up & polished an older thing instead.

And whaddaya know! in early October, I was told they wanted to publish it!  Which did much to make me feel like a writer again.

“Cold” was published on October 31, 2009 in Crossed Genres Issue #12, the LGBT issue, & you can still read it online there.  (When it’s no longer live there, & my contract with Crossed Genres permits, I will republish it right here at Henkimaa.com.)  “Cold” was also selected for inclusion in Crossed Genres‘ first-year anthology, which will include one story from each of the magazines first 12 issues.  I think it’s still on schedule for publication in February.

My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.

November for me was the headlong hurry of NaNoWriMo.  As a result, as anyone who knows this blog saw, I didn’t do much blogging at all.  Such blog posts as got posted were mostly automatically generated “Daily Tweets” posts from my Twitter feed.  And I haven’t done much blogging since NaNoWriMo ended, either.

But whoa! I did a lot of writing — 51,607 words worth of it in November, making me a NaNoWriMo winner this year…. er… I mean, last year.  I was writing in the same story universe as “Cold,” which is about two young women on an extrasolar planet (that is, in another solar system) in the late stages of terraformation, which I’ve finally named Oikos — but my NaNovember 2009 writing was mostly about three centuries earlier in the timeline, before & around the time the ships that will eventually arrive at Oikos leave our solar system.  I called it Long Dark.

And a lot of it was background writing, rather than the story itself.  Because there is so damn much science that I need to have at least some kind of grasp on before I can do the story for real.

Though I came up with at least four stories over the course of the month that I know I can shape into good damn stuff.  And I also discovered that a character of mine from a supposedly completely unrelated project is, whaddaya know, an important historical figure for the society in Long Dark and Cold.  And since that character is very closely based on me… whoa, it’s an awful lot like, well, writing myself into history.  How cool is that?

(Or how egotistical?)

12. Since then…

… that is, during December — what have I been doing?  Not blogging, clearly. Except for one extensive rant about the leakage in various portions of my ceiling.  (Now cured, but the holes in the ceiling still need patching.)  Other than that, lots of vegging out, some writing, lots of reading — my latest topics have included atmospheric pressure, altitude sickness, & spacesuit design (background research for a story in the Cold universe) & how people with strabismus or amblyopia (the latter being the case for me), most of whom grow up stereoblind, might be able to develop stereo (binocular) vision.  Even at 50 years old. Which is what I am now.

50 years old, soon to be 51. And now I reflect on where I was at when I turned 50, early in 2009.  I was still in the cave.  But there were inklings of possibility.  I was still in the cave, for instance, when a confluence of ideas led me to decide how to go about my writing life, which included blogging & other forms of social media to get my stuff out there, instead of just through the old “send out craploads of query letters & get a shitload of rejection letters back before someone finally decides your stuff is good enough to publish” method that has been standard for a very bloody long time.  I knew I’d feel a lot more at ease finding my own audience through social media than going through the query letter drudgery.  It was still pretty remarkable that I made such a decision at such a time, though: social media? for someone who, at that point, was incapable & unmotivated to communicate at all?  But then, I knew the cave walls would dissolve sooner or later.  And they did.

I was also deciding, back in February of 2009 that age 50 was a good time to reach the milestone that I had apparently reached in the sorrows of that time.  The boy that I & Rozz-now-Ptery raised from age 9 was now 21 (& now, some months later, is actually 22), & is setting out on his own course in the world.  He’s in a residential job training program; I seem him some weekends when he comes into town.  Ptery is embarked on another course, living a nomadic life mostly off-the-grid in the Lower 48; we are no longer partners, however much we still love each other. So, I am single &, except for my cat & the boy’s dog, essentially alone.

When I was in college & took a class on Hinduism, I learned that the traditional life path for very pious Brahmin males was supposed to consist of several stages — four of them, I think — with the third stage being that of husband, father, & householder.  When the householding stage was over, these guys were apparently supposed to just up & lickety-split out to the forest to become religious ascetics.  Or something like that.

And when I turned 50, I thought: that’s it, I’m no longer a householder.  Well, I still have my apartment.  And I don’t plan to go live in the woods as an ascetic.  (Ptery’s path is a little closer to that, really.)  But I no longer have the responsibilities of a spouse/partner or of a parent to a minor child.  I can do what I want.  And what I need.

Which is to write.  But dang, it sure takes me a long time to get the politics out of my way to do it.

But I got to that point, & now I plan to continue.

That’s my story.

I’m such a cathead.

Related posts:

1. True Diversity Dinner 1 & 2: Video by Janson Jones
2. True Diversity Dinner video, part 3: Hotel workers, & Elvi's speech
3. True Diversity Dinner: September 25, 2009

Yesterday at lunchtime I had a great IM conversation with Ptery — as my former partner Rozz is now known — & our friend Chris.  I hadn’t talked with Chris in a really long time: he lives in Salt Lake City now, & what with, first, a lengthy period of being in the cave from about last August to last March, followed by Anchorage’s Summer of Hate & other political this’n'thats, I haven’t been that great at keeping in touch with him.  Ptery I’ve kept in better contact with, at least when he’s on the grid: he’s a transman who is living something of a nomadic life right now.

I dug around in my Flickr photostream to get a photo of both of them, & found these: photos of a hike we took along the very northern part of the Kenai Peninsula adjoining Turnagain Arm in May 2006 with Jesse (Rozz’s nephew who we raised from age 9) & Jesse’s dog Sweetheart.  I surprised some emotion looking at them: I had no idea when they were the changes that would follow, which leave us all except Sweetheart & me living in different places now.  (Though I do see Jesse every couple of weeks or so: he’s in the Job Corps in Palmer.)

Distance.

But despite distance — what a great talk! I’ll be talking with Chris more tonight when I get off work.  I’ve mentioned before that I’ll be doing NaNoWriMo again in November, & I was really happy to hear that Chris is too.  We cheered each other along all the way through NaNoWriMo in 2007, and at the tail end of it, with both of us having successfully completed 50,000 words or more in the month, we both kicked back at the Bear Tooth Grill to celebrate.  I don’t know what he was drinking, but I was drinking Pipeline Stout. And that’s Rozz he’s talking with on my cellphone.

I should mention that Chris writes really cool poems. We first met in a small poetry workshop that I facilitated for several years beginning in 1998. Maybe I can persuade him to let me post a couple.

Related posts:

1. Tramping in the woods
2. Divorce, financially interdependent partner style
3. NaNoWriMo 2007: What it is

Rozz, Jesse, & a friend on Homer Spit, Homer, Alaska in 2003, some years after this poem was written.

Saying “I Love You”

Saturday I show him the video
of the trip you and I took after we
first met.  It was almost four years ago.

The tape starts with a pond along the highway
to Valdez.  There are swans, a beaver lodge,
but of you and I there are voices only.

He identifies them — “That’s you!”  “That’s Rozz!” —
but wants to see us, too.  I remember:
we hadn’t said it yet, we hadn’t touched.

Next day, there’s footage of you, a bare
couple seconds of you — “There she is!” — seated
in grass beside another pond, a near

walk from Squirrel Creek, our last night’s campsite.
The next shots were taken miles and hours away,
of Copper River as seen from the height

of the highest point on the Edgerton Highway,
then up close where, I tell him, you and I
went swimming.  He doesn’t have my memory —

he wasn’t there — for what transpired between standby
and record, between off and on — after
the glimpse of you at Squirrel Creek when I

shut down the camera.  The words were not taped
that we spoke there.  The camera didn’t witness
the first halting declarations, didn’t capture

the meeting of our hands between the car seats
as we drove the Edgerton to Copper River, where
(I do not tell him) we went skinnydipping.

That whole trip we drove from water to water,
from the Copper to Fielding Lake where glass-thin
ice tinkled downcreek past our camp; to Chena River

where mosquitoes like oil derricks examined
the shirt wrapped around your head as mosquito
netting; to Montana Creek in dark and rain,

where you made fiddlehead stew.  I fast forward through
the next morning’s endless footage — my camcorder eye
contemplating each shallow pure eddy whose slow

clarity disclosed the creek bottom lined
with pink and grey pebbles, and each turbulent
rapid with a raging surface defined

by white foam and roaring.  At the confluence
of waters, the running of creek into river,
from your separate walk you reappear in the lens —

“There she is!” — his excitement, just as I felt there,
in that moment.  Remember, love, those were the days
when we became love to one another —

and I remember, you first told me their names
in those sweet days of Bird Creek; of Captain Cook
State Park; of Anchor Point where we waded

the surf; of Homer Spit where two black dogs
swam the bay after balls the man threw.
Their names . . . the boy, his sister, their brother. . . .

A Kalifornsky Beach Road scenic overview:
he watches, with a child’s distaste and fascination,
our kiss.  He wasn’t there, he doesn’t know

that his sitting here beside me this Saturday
morning, he alone of the three, he owes
to that kiss, to those days in that landscape.

Oh, love.  Because I say it to you,
I must learn to say it to him, too.

[February 2, 1997]

About this poem

Took a rest today from thinking about the Anchorage equal rights ordinance & the politics of antigay hatred being directed at it from predictable quarters.  Mostly today I rested & read.  And then, at eight, went down to the train station to pick up Jesse, who decided yesterday to take the opportunity of a couple days off from the work he’d doing this summer at Denali National Park to make a visit home.

Home. Now, there’s a thought.  He’s not “my kid” by biological relationship, nor have we ever had a legal relationship.  And yet, home, & all because of love.

Here’s the deal.  This is a post, & a poem, about love: the love that I had (still have) for Jesse’s aunt Rozz (now Ptery), which led me into the relationship I have with him — bringing him into my family because of my love for her, learning to love him (it was quite a challenge, to begin with!) because of my love for her.

This is a post, & a poem, about politics. Because what it comes down to with issues like the Anchorage equal rights ordinance, or of marriage equality for same-sex couples, is that our love is run roughshod over by the political intrusions of hatred & intolerance.  Hatred & intolerance insists — or rather, the people who carry that hatred & intolerance, because it isn’t simply emotional but actual people who do this — these hate-filled & intolerant people insist that our lives & our loves have no worth, & take political action to prevent us from being accorded the same rights that they themselves take for granted.  (And then, true double-thinkers that they are, they even have the nerve to claim we’re asking for “special” rights.)

Terrence des Pres, writing about the political intrusions on private life, quotes Czeslaw Milosz:

The first movement is singing,
A free voice, filling mountains and valleys.
The first movement is joy,
But it is taken away. [Ref. 1]

That’s their object: to take it away.  Let’s not let ‘em.

Meantime: because of love, this boy, now grown into a young man under the care of two women who loved each other in spite of those political intrusions… now come home for a couple of days.  So there’s another reason for this post & poem: to celebrate.

I wrote this in 1997, shortly after he first came to live with us at age 9.

It’s in a rough terza rima with very slanty rhymes.

References

1. From Czleslaw Milosz, “The Poor Poet,” quoted by Terrence Des Pres, Praises & Dispraises: Poetry and Politics, the 20th Century (New York: Penguin Books, 1989)

Related posts:

1. Tributaries (poem)
2. Ode to Alcohol (poem)
3. Alaska Love Poem

Mel & Rozz, 2006

Good news from Maine Wednesday: its legislature passed, & its governor signed, a law making it legal for same-sex couples to marry.  This makes Maine the 5th state in the U.S., after Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, & Iowa, to grant the same civil rights & responsibilities of marriage granted to heterosexual couples, to lesbian & gay couples.  On the same day New Hampshire’s legislature passed a similar bill, which is awaiting its governor’s action.

Good news indeed; so why was it simultaneously making me feel a bit blue? Fact is, I always feel some ambivalence anymore when I heard news about same-sex marriage, regardless of whether it’s good or bad.  Maybe I always will.

(Which isn’t to say I won’t stand up for it.)

But why?  I was feeling enough of the blues on Wednesday, that I decided to write more about it.

More than a decade ago, my friends Jay Brause & Gene Dugan were amongst the first in the nation to challenge the unquestioned custom of refusing marriage licenses to gay or lesbian couples.  Exact details elude me — it was a long time ago — but lucky for me: online sources are kind.  Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance (incidentally one of the best websites on religion out there) has a great summary of the events (& there’s some other sources below).  Basically, Jay & Gene applied for a marriage license in Alaska in 1994, were denied, & took it to court.  In February 1998, Judge Peter Michalski of Anchorage Superior Court issued a decision in their favor, ordering the State of Alaska to show a compelling reason why heterosexuals should be granted special rights to marry that were denied to gay men & lesbians.  The State of Alaska appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court, & meantime the Alaska Legislature acted to prevent same-sex marriage, placing on the November 1998 ballot a measure — Ballot Measure 2 — which would, if passed, amend the state constitution to define marriage as being “between a man and a women.”  Similar stuff was going on in Hawaii at the same time.

Jay Brause, Gene Dugan, Fred Hillman, & Les Baird at Alaska Gay & Lesbian Resource Center, 1982

Enter the personal history part of the story.

Personal #1 is that I’d known Jay & Gene since first arriving in Alaska in August 1982, in fact shared a house with them & our “landlady” Sami & her three kids, until Sami remarried & we moved to our own separate households.  They were (& are, despite distance) my  my very good friends, & they were also — especially Jay — guys I worked very closely with on the activist front of working for equal rights for lesbians/gays in Alaska. At the time of our meeting, Jay was executive director of the Alaska Gay & Lesbian Resource Center (now known as Identity, Inc.), & he coaxed me (without too much difficulty) to join its board of directors as secretary.  We later worked together, along with a whole lotta other people, on two important studies of Alaska’s lesbian/gay population, One in 10: A Profile of Alaska’s Lesbian & Gay Community (Anchorage, AK: Identity, Inc., 1986) & Green & Brause, Identity Reports: Sexual Orientation Bias in Alaska (Anchorage, AK: Identity, Inc., 1989). Meanwhile, Gene was doing the work that led to the creation of the theatre company Out North, beginning with his bringing to Alaska the play “My Blue Heaven” about two lesbian homesteaders. They worked together for years at Out North, Gene as artistic director & Jay as managing director, until their departure from Alaska in 2006.

Mel & JJ on backpacking trip to Williwaw Lakes, Chugach State Park, 1997

By the time the marriage stuff rolled around in 1994, we didn’t see quite so much of each other.  This was thanks in part to my general burnout on matters political, organizational, & activist-oriented; in part to my pursuit of an MFA degree at University of Alaska Anchorage; & in part due to Personal #2, which was the relationship I’d formed in 1993 with my partner, Rozz.

The establishment, after many long years of living alone & single, of a relationship & family life became even more a factor after December 1996, which was when Rozz’s nephew JJ (as he was then known) came to live with us: age 9, his life to that date one of abuse, neglect, & a succession of foster & group homes.  He came to us violent, striking out at us preemptively before we could hurt him, as he was sure we would do — after all, everyone else in his life had.

It was a rough time.  I’m talking rough.  This was a boy who had been at the very least witness to sexual abuse of one of his siblings, if not a victim of it himself; & had most definitely been victim of physical & emotional abuse & neglect.  And for many long months in his fear of more of the same, he took it out on us.  I had never lived with abuse before — an abuse that I reckon was not him abusing me, but was his father reaching through him — as JJ used to say, “[My father] is in my head.”  It messed me up so badly, it took months to for me a wordworker to fnd words for it:

Cycle

the man in the head of the boy
the father of memory
the father who could pitch
his sons into the wall
the man who used their sister
for his “needs”
who sold them back for
four hundred dollars
in an Oklahoma City
KFC

the man in the head of the boy
the man in the boy’s fist
in his kicking feet his butting head
his spit on my face his biting teeth
in the bruise yellow and purple and green
on my arm the blood beneath my skin

the hurt that cannot speak

[August 4–November 14, 1997; rev. 11/18/97]

But now jump ahead to 1998.  Judge Michalski has made his ruling in Jay’s & Gene’s case.  The Legislature in reaction has done its thing.  Ballot Measure 2 is on the ballot for November: a measure that will, if passed, enshrine in the very basis of our society, our state constitution, the belief of the body politic that the close intimate relationship & commitment of two women with each other, or two men with each other, isn’t worth a bloody damn thing.

I was barely aware of any of this.  Because in spite of everything — in spite of completing my MFA, in spite of us having successfully gotten through the difficult first year of JJ’s life with us, of JJ giving up his violence & learning to trust us — in spite of all that, Rozz’s & my relationship came apart.

Jesse & his dog Sweetheart, resting up during a backpacking trip up Powerline Pass, June 2004

I won’t go into all the details of that here.  I’m doing it & have done it elsewhere, much of it in private where it will stay. Suffice it to say that we came back together again a year later, we talked it all out, we came to understand that our breakup or breach came about due to the incredible pressures that came with taking on a very hurt child, we forgave each other, we continued to raise the boy, & the boy, now a young man at 21, is — oh damn, just a very very fine young man, who even as I write is well on his way to an independent life doing just what he wants to do.  (Meantime, I’m taking care of his dog Sweetheart.)

At the time I didn’t know things would turn out that way.  At the time I only knew I felt a deep sense of betrayal because it all came so unexpectedly.  One day we met a new friend — I’ll just call her D — & a month later, Rozz was gone, & JJ with her, & I was just a 160-pounds-or-so mass of confusion, grief, anger, & dumbfoundedness.  (A month or so later: I was a 140-pounds-or-so mass of the same, having lost my appetite on what I dubbed at the time the Official Grief & Dumbfoundedness Weight Loss Program. I’ve got better ways of taking off the excess nowadays, thanks.)

And so my life through most of 1998 from the late spring on was one of trying to make sense of it all, & put my life back together after it had been tossed into the air & scattered like a game of 52-card-pickup.  I felt that all the meanings of my life, of my life together with Rozz, had been summarily & unilaterally flushed down the toilet.  I was scraped down to bedrock, & didn’t have the emotional reserves to give much attention to the Ballot Measure 2 & the battle for marriage equality.

And yet it did come up.  Because, you see, the pain I was feeling was pretty damn illustrative of the whole point. Do you feel that kind of anguish for the loss of a relationship when it means (as our enemies would like to have it) absolutely nothing?  Of course not.

And you know what? The people in my life — not just the lesbians & gay men, not just my family members & friends, but my coworkers too — they knew it. They treated me accordingly.  Just after I voted against Ballot Measure 2 that November, I wrote to some friends:

I’ve gotta say, though, that what indicates to me changes toward the good for lesbians & gays…which will be present regardless of the votes outcome…are present every day in my life, and have especially been present for me this last nasty year, as all my coworkers, family, friends have treated me with the same love & respect & concern in my hard times as they would have treated any nongay person going through the same nasty shit. Just as a matter of course.

Just as a matter of course. No aren’t we so very special for being so knee-jerk-liberal compassionate to this poor sad second-class citizen.  Just simple care & compassion because they knew that I was worth something, & that my relationship was every bit as valuable to me, as their own relationships were to them.

Tell me, Jesus: who has followed your way more closely: my coworkers, who treated me with compassion during a devastating period of my life, or the Alaska Family Coalition, financed mainly by out-of-state interests that worked so hard to make discrimination against people like me part of Alaska’s foundational document — & telling lies in the process?

From an Alaskans for Civil Rights/No on 2  press release dated October 31, 1998:

False and misleading information fills the Alaska Family Coalition display ad published in today’s Anchorage Daily News. The ad claims that the decision of an Alaskan judge found Alaska’s marriage law unconstitutional and would “replace…Alaska’s existing marriage law” and that the NO on 2 campaign’s claims to the contrary are “completely false.”

In fact, it is currently illegal for same-sex couples to be married in Alaska and this will not be changed by the defeat of Ballot Measure 2….

… “Yes on 2″ fliers also claim if the measure is defeated, young children will be introduced to homosexual doctrine at an early age and schools will be required to teach that homosexual relationships are “normal” and equal to traditional marriage….

Another lie. Apparently to the Alaska Family Coalition, family values & let’s tell another lie are tantamount to synonyms.

And was it really the Alaska Family Coalition, or was it rather the Coalition of a Few Conservative Alaska Figureheads Funded Mainly by Interests from Out-of-State who Might Have a Sister Living in North Pole or a Nephew Who Served in the Air Force in Alaska for a Couple of Years but Probably Not Even That? The press release goes on to say:

Alaskan Public Offices Commission (APOC) reports filed by both campaigns on October 27 reveal that the Alaska Family Coalition has raised more than $637,000 while the Alaskans for Civil Rights/NO on 2! campaign has received just under $190,000 in donations.

Dan Carter, treasurer of Alaskans for Civil Rights/No on 2, explains further in a letter to Alaska newspapers dated October 30, 1998:

But the amount raised is only part of the story. Who and where it comes from is the real news in this report. While Alaskans for Civil Rights has received $35 from Outside gay/lesbian organizations ($25 from the Philadelphia Task Force and $10 from Pride, Inc. from Macon, GA), the proponents of this unnecessary measure were receiving almost $560,000 from Outside groups trying to rewrite Alaska’s constitution. When you look at how much money each side has raised from INDIVIDUAL ALASKANS, the financial reports are even more revealing. For every dollar raised by the NO on 2 campaign, 89 cents has come from individual Alaskans. On the other hand, for each dollar raised by the so-called Alaska Family Coalition, less than 9 cents has come from individuals living in Alaska. That’s the real issue in this campaign. Why should Outsiders determine if Alaska’s constitution should be amended? What is their agenda?

But that’s just some of the info that arrived in my email inbox.  More personally, as the debate leading up raged on in the media, some of it inevitably showed up on the radio that I listened to at work every day. Probably KSKA, then, Anchorage public radio. There was a call-in program about Ballot Measure 2, & some self-defined Christian brought up an argument about “family orientation.” I couldn’t hold back. As I later described to friends in an email:

I called up and talked about how this boy, JJ (I didn’t name him), had been the product of one of these much-vaunted heterosexual unions, had been severely sexually, emotionally, physically abused and neglected by his heterosexual father and his heterosexual mother…and the only reason he had a chance now was because we, two lesbians, had brought him into our family.

And you know, even with all that has happened since, it’s still true.

So to damnation to all you self-righteous “family values” advocates whose dictionary definition of family is so far from reality.

Jesse's graduation, West High, May 2006

And you know, even with all that has happened in the ten & a half years since, up until this very day, it’s still true: though I have no legal relationship, & never have had a legal relationship, with the boy once know as JJ who is now the young man Jesse — I am more a mother to him than his heterosexual biological mother is or has ever been, excepting only that she gave birth to him & he carries her (as well as his abusive father’s) genes.  (Though I credit her with caring more for him than his father, & staying in touch with him in ways he’s okay with, whereas his father he outright hates.) And furthermore, it was Rozz & me, two lesbians, whose bond of love & commitment despite its lack of sanction by our fellow citizens made it possible for Jesse to have a life of possibility & love, rather than life that would likely be no more than a repetition of the same cycle of abuse that had brought him to us in the first place.

So much for the superiority of opposite-sex marriage.

Which isn’t to say that opposite-sex marriage is inferior either. I am the child of heterosexual parents, whose love for & commitment to each other & to their family has been just as powerful a foundation for my life, as mine & Rozz’s has been for Jesse’s.  Marriage equality — get it?  Some relationships suck, some are marvelous.  Sexual orientation does not on its own make for one or the other.  It takes the individuals involved, their love, their committment, their elbow grease.

Be that as it may, on November 3, 1998, Ballot Measure passed by a 2 to 1 vote. With the vote half-counted, the Anchorage Daily News reported the following day:

The campaigns working for and against passage of the amendment steered around the thorny question of whether homosexuality is right or wrong.

But some voters saw the question as a referendum on homosexuality itself.

And in an email to friends, I commented:

And the majority rules, so therefore homosexuality is wrong? Of course not. Because us lesbians & gay men, dykes & faggots, queers, lezzies, homos — whatever else we may not know about ourselves, we do know this: Who We Are, from the inside, in regards to our sexuality. The meanings of our lives, from the center of our lives. Not defined, not prescribed or proscribed or whatever by the homophobic jerks or the plain dumb ignoramuses.

But it wasn’t just me or other lesbians & gay men who remained integrally human, regardless of the votes of ignorance or hatred. It was also many, so many, of our nongay families, friends, & coworkers:

Today I still go into work and find Bob, Jan, Nancy, Cassie, Sharon, Krista, Larry, Lisa — people, all of them heterosexual, who know me and who are not influenced in their feelings about me by this so-called “referendum on homosexuality.” They are still the people who watched my love for Rozz blossom & grow, saw the bite marks on my arm when JJ was terrorizing us, saw the results of her betrayal of me, all my pain. I have not changed as a result of this vote, nor have they.

So much for definitions applied externally. So much for the right winger denotation of “homosexuality.”

But you see now, I think, the reason for my ambivalence about same-sex marriage made clear. So much of my response to the events of 1998 arose out of the dilemmas of my own personal situation.  Not matter how much I might philosophize about the difference between enacted law & real reality, a part of me was deeply upset & angry that Ballot Measure 2 passed.  But another part of me was cynical about it all.  How could I help but be cynical, when D, the new girlfriend of Rozz who just scant weeks before had to my knowledge been my lifelong partner, somehow set herself up as some sort of spokesperson for marriage equality, & even finagled Rozz into appearing with her on Herb Shainlin’s radio show to tell Anchorage all about it?  I was self-preserving enough to avoid their radio appearance (I stuck with my normal radio station KSKA instead) — but yeah, of course it disturbed me.  Of course it affected my feelings.

But see, that’s the thing, all over again.  The demand for marriage equality isn’t a demand for people to believe that our (lesbian/gay) relationships are perfect, to require they be free of mistakes, breakups, divorces.  Marriage equality, get it?  The demand is simply to recognize in law the reality that already is fact in the substance of our beings: our relationships count to us, as much as yours do to you.  Yet in our relationships we will struggle just as much as our nongay neighbors with communication, commitment, love, all the stuff that makes up marriage.  When our rights are honored, no doubt we’ll be a good match for heterosexuals in our divorce rates, too. (Though I’d like to hope for better.)

But the law as it stands in Alaska &, at this writing, 43 other states, puts extra obstacles in our way at the outset: discouraging our commitments, treating our care for one another with contempt, destabilizing our families & our ability to take care of our children, making life harder.

How amazing, then, that so many of our relationships last out the years — as indeed with Jay & Gene, who met in 1978 at the Alaska Gay Community Center (as it was then called)  & are still together 31 years later.

The happy family, 2006: Mel, Rozz, Jesse (playing w/ Photobooth)

Fast forward again, then, to 2009, the present day. A lot of water under the bridge, both in the continuing fight for marriage & other forms of social equality, & in my personal life.  As already stated, Rozz & I returned to one another (only a year after our separation), talked a lot, worked it out, reestablished our relationship, & saw Jesse through the rest of his childhood, into his early adulthood.  What’s that, you say?  Family values?  Yes.

But as I’ve alluded to elsewhere, our relationship is changing once again, & we can no longer be called partners.  The stresses & pressures now are quite a bit different.  That’s for another post, or many, who knows: the upshot is that my partner Rozz, who I always understood to be a woman & a lesbian, decided last year to finally honor an understanding long in the making: not a she, but a he: an FTM, female-to-male transsexual, a transman.  Which has just a tiny bearing on me, since I’m still… well… a lesbian.  And more on that in later posts, perhaps.  But even more a difficulty for me: that Rozz — or rather, Ptery (pronounced like Terry) — has chosen, at least for now, to live his life off the grid, from the land, out of a backpack & tent, & not in Alaska.

So now Maine, now New Hampshire.  Before that, Vermont, Iowa.  A few months ago, California won, & lost again with Prop. 8. Before that, Massachusetts.  And I look at it all, & I’m of two minds: the one, rejoicing for those like me whose relationships are finally being honored in law as they are in our hearts.  And the other, in sorrow for my own loss.

Mel at Anchorage protest of California's Prop 8, 15 Nov 2008

But marriage equality, get it?  My loss is special, special to me; but no more special — nor any less — than is the loss experienced by anyone who suffers a breakup or divorce.  It is a private sorrow (though I speak of it publicly), that proceeds out of private lives, private choices.  It is not directly the fault of public institutions like marriage, even if those institutions exclude me. (Though that exclusion might well have been a factor contributing to our difficulties.)

And so despite the ambivalence born of my private sorrow, I will celebrate every advance that leads to the public recognition & honoring of any relationship between two (or even more!) consenting adults.

Go Maine!  Go New Hampshire!

* * *

Marriage is a public institution that grants certain rights & privileges, & also responsibilities, to people who have chosen to bond with one another in private relationships. Jay’s & Gene’s case in Brause v. Bureau of Vital Statistics was based in part on Alaska’s constitutional right to privacy.   And so in his judgment in February 1998, Judge Michalski wrote:

The relevant question is not whether same-sex marriage is so rooted in our traditions that it is a fundamental right, but whether the freedom to choose one’s own life partner is so rooted in our traditions.

Judge Michalski ruled that the Alaska Constitution, as it then stood, upheld our private freedom to choose our own life partners, whether we chose partners of the same or of opposite sex.

Ballot Measure 2 maintained that right for some people, but stripped it away for others.

We claim it still.  Nor are we alone.  From the Anchorage Daily News story on Ballot Measure 2′s passage published November 4, 1998:

Julie Stephens, a married mother of two, said she mulled the question over a lot and discussed it with her husband. In the end, she decided to vote against the amendment.

“People should be allowed to marry who they want to marry,” she said. “Times change.”

And sometimes they don’t.

That little flourish from ADN, more than anything, really riled me up.  And sometimes they don’t?!!!  I commented in email to friends:

And yet, in spite of the vote, they have. The ballot box does not measure the hearts of the people I work with, or my family, or my friends, or the families & friends & acquaintances of innumerable lesbians & gay men, who as the result of us coming out, as the result of their willingness to grapple in their own souls with the meaning of Difference, found themselves capable of still caring about us, of loving us *for* our Difference, even, not just in spite of it.

The changes that have happened have still happened. Regardless of the vote. The meanings are deep underneath, in our lives.

And that’s why ultimately we will achieve our goal of marriage equality, as well as other equal rights under the law.  Not just because of our own efforts, but because of the good hearts of our nongay friends and families, who recognize just as Julie Stephens did that it is indeed our right, everyone’s right, to choose their own life partners.  Who recognize that even with our differences, we are fundamentally the same in our humanity, no matter the propaganda that seeks to dehumanize us as degenerates or (in Wayne Anthony Ross’ 2009 update of his 1993 terminology) lima beans.

Remember that in the next weeks & months & years.  Yeah, we’ve still got a long way to go.  But how far we’ve come. Have heart.

* * *

I know you didn’t ask for it, but thanks all the same to Jay Brause & Gene Dugan for your efforts to establish marriage equality under the law not only for yourselves, but for all gay men & lesbians in Alaska &, ultimately, the U.S.  And also to all those in Alaska & elsewhere who have fought for those rights, & have voted for them.

I know you didn’t ask for it, but thanks all the same to my colleagues & coworkers, past & present, at the Justice Center at University of Alaska Anchorage, who did me & continue to do me the great service of treating me, simply, as a human being, as a friend, as a colleague.  Hey, folks: that’s what it’s all about.  May anyone who reads this blog take a lesson from you.

Mel & Ptery, Spokane, Apr 2009 (my brother Dave in the background)

And Rozz who is now Ptery, you’ll read this at some point, I’m sure.  Sorrow blah blah — we’ve come through so many times together, good & bad, easy & hard, & we are family & love & deep deep friendship to one another regardless of cis/trans, or whether we live in the same place, or however our relationship is shaped.  Thanks for coming to Spokane to see my dad with me, & thanks for being an ever-presence in my life.  I love you.

* * *

Further reading on Brause & Dugan v. Alaska Bureau of Vital Statistics and Ballot Measure 2:

Brause v. Bureau of Vital Statistics, No. 3AN-95-6562 CI, 1998 WL 88743 (Alaska Superior Court, Feb. 27, 1998).

The original ruling by Anchorage Superior Court Judge Peter Michalski; ruled that Alaska’s marriage laws violated the state constitutional right to privacy and the fundamental right to marry, and constituted sex discrimination. Also available through the Freedom to Marry website, which also provides a list as of 1998 (I think) of Alaska statutes pertaining to married people in Alaska — i.e., the specific ways in which same-sex couples, not permitted to marry, are discriminated against by the Alaska Constitution as amended by passage of Ballot Measure 2.

Ruskin, Liz. (4 Nov 1998). “Gay marriage ban approved.” Anchorage Daily News.

ADN’s day-after report on passage of the Ballot Measure 2. Rachel D’Oro and Lisa Demer also contributed to the story.  I will attempt to forgive the rhetorical flourishes that pissed me off at the time.

Alaska Constitution, Article I, Section 25 (1998) — “Marriage.”

Ballot Measure 2 passed by a vote of 152,965 in favor, 71,631 against in the election of November 3, 1998. States that: “To be valid or recognized in this State, a marriage may exist only between one man and one woman.”

Clarkson, Kevin G.; Coolidge, David Orgon; & Duncan, William C. (Dec 1999). “The Alaska Marriage Amendment: The People’s Choice on the Last Frontier.” 16 Alaska Law Review 213.

Law review article examining the history & constitutionality of the marriage amendment.  Authors were all supporters of the amendment.

Molsberry, Ken. (26 Apr 2009). “1997-1998: Brause & Dugan v. Alaska.” The Freedom to Marry: Rites & Rights. Retrieved 7 May 2009.

Puts Brause v. Bureau of Vital Statistics in the context of the overall history of the fight for marriage equality.

Molsberry, Ken. (26 Apr 2009). “1998-1999: Constitutional amendments.” The Freedom to Marry: Rites & Rights. Retrieved 7 May 2009.

Covers the passage of constitutional amendments in both Alaska & Hawaii, the first states to enshrine discrimination against gay & lesbian couples into their state constitutions.

Robinson, B.A. (10 Sep 2007). “Same-sex marriage in Alaska.” Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance. Retrieved 7 May 2009.

A basic summary of the events leading to the passage of Ballot Measure 2 and its immediate (legal) aftermath.

Related posts:

1. Q & A: What happens when you click "Volunteer" at the Alaskans for Parental Rights website?
2. Prop 8 again
3. Props to the Prop 8 judge

Dissolving is very much how it felt, how it often feels when the grey begins to leave. Maybe the pit too, I’m not sure. In either case, though, there’s strong physical sensation that goes with the feeling of unease & depression, especially in the gut/womb area. So when it goes it’s like a mass of some sort being broken up & dissolving away. But I wasn’t certain, having been up later than I’d hoped last night, that it would really go all the way, just because of not enough sleep. Then I woke this morning, hitting the snooze on my Palm (which has acted as my alarm clock for several months now), feeling the weight of Vai, my cat, against me, & I thought, It’s gone. But I didn’t know for sure until I’d been up for awhile, because often I don’t know. Often when it’s still there, I don’t know until I’ve been vertical for some time, & the grey slides back into place. It didn’t today, thankfully.

It’s also like a fever breaking. And with that analogy in mind, I’m taking care not to push myself now anymore than I did yesterday. Fever broken doesn’t mean the ordeal’s over. Still need bed rest. Still, in my case, feel fatigue & the potential to return to grey, if I am unwise.

Not that grey is a bad color, by the way. This is a particular kind of grey… dusty & bleak.

Tonight: vegging out a bit with the TV. The boy, when he returned from his summer/early fall job in King Salmon, turned me into a Battlestar Galactica fan, & now I’ve seen all of Seasons 1 & 2 on DVD, I’m entering the middle of the first half of Season 3 by having upgraded my cable service a couple of evenings ago. Too bad I missed several Season 3 episodes already, but I’ll just have to snatch them in reruns I guess. In the meantime, I’ve caught up on the story by reading episode synopses. But I’m afraid Rozz might come back to a TV addict. Ewwwww.

Related posts:

1. The grey
2. Actually, I kinda like clouds…
3. Waking from the grey

Just in case my earlier bike jaunt wasn’t enough exercise for the day, we packed me, Rozz, Jesse, Jesse’s dog Sweetheart, & Jesse’s bike (unnamed) into the car & drove out to our old neighborhood in East Anchorage at the very edge of Ft. Richardson Military Reservation, where we went for a walk.

Juniper moss

The trail wasn’t very good for biking: very muddy. But that was more Jesse’s problem than ours, though we did have to take a lot of side trips into the brush to avoid soaking our feet.

But don’t call them side trips. They became ends in themselves.

Consider that it’s just barely spring here, but most of the trees haven’t even budded out in leaves yet, pussywillows but no flowers. To a certain cast of eye, the forest is dead & dreary — little color to it but brown & grey, dead leaves crackling underfoot, the trail in a mush of mud & brown puddles.

Lichen

But look again, & there is so much green: the dark green of black spruce needles, the brighter greens of moss & juniper moss & creeping jenny & club moss carpeting the floor. But what I noticed most this trip was the lichen: all kinds of lichen, & lucky for me my camera takes damn good macros. I took a lot of them.

I gather Jesse rode his bike to the powerline & followed it left as far as it goes before that steep drop to the little tributary creek, then came back, & took a little nap waiting for us. But Rozz was investigating things her way, & I was investigating them mine, with the camera, so by the time we got to the powerline we didn’t have much more than time enough to take a look at the wolf scat Jesse had found, fibrous with moose hair, & then head back. (Normally, we have no deadline for a jaunt like this, but we needed to get some groceries at Natural Pantry before the closed at 8:00.)

Jesse in the saddle

We all cut through the woods through most of the walk back to the trailhead, Jesse pushing his bike along. He found a really cool cottonwood tree that I was called over to see: a huge thick grandma (or grandpa, didn’t check its sex) of a tree that sometime in its youth had for some reason dipped its trunk downwards, toward the ground, missing it by a foot or so before it grew upwards again.

This was our first trample in the Ft. Rich woods this year. It’s good to go there, every time. I miss living so close that it’s just a step out the door & a walk across the parking lot.

And then we went & got our groceries, & then we stopped by Blockbuster & got some DVDs, & then we went home & watched them.

Related posts:

1. Saying "I Love You" (poem)
2. Despite distance
3. Round Mountain, NV