Henkimaa » UAA

Harm at the center

Mel Green — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 18:35:08 +0000

A couple of years ago, Bent Alaska announced a LGBTQ panel at University of Alaska Anchorage, an institution of which I am both an employee & an alumna. So on April 1, 2009, I attended the panel which held in the Consortium Library just upstairs from my department. After I got home that night, I even started drafting a blog post about it. Then I forgot all about it…until I discovered it hidden away amongst my old drafts.

This post is that post, completed.

Some of the discussion at that two-years-ago panel revolved around improving the kind of support that LGBTQ students, faculty, & staff receive at UAA, whether through the existing student organization The Family, or institutionally through expanding the Women’s Studies Program (which sponsored the event) to be a Women’s and Gender Studies Program; through other institutional means at UAA or the University of Alaska statewide, such as a nondiscrimination policy; or through strengthening the connections between the university LGBTQ & the larger Anchorage LGBTQ community, including ally organizations like Anchorage PFLAG.

(Just a few weeks ago, the UA Board of Regents finally passed a policy on February 18, 2011 which added sexual orientation to the University of Alaska’s nondiscrimination policy. It is as yet unclear whether the Regents intend this policy to also cover gender identity/expression.)

But there was also a lot of discussion about the whole gender identity/expression and sexual orientation thing, and how we had variously experienced it. We had gay folks, lesbian folks, male-to-female and female-to-male transfolk, a Samoan fa’afafine alum, a PFLAG mother of a lesbian, another mother of a daughter who might actually be her son (i.e., trans). We had students, a couple of staff members including me, a faculty member, and a number of people from the community. We had various ages from college student age all the way to people in their 50s and 60s.

What really stuck out for me was the common experience most of us (all except the “allies”) had of pushing through to be ourselves in the face of huge pressure to conform to other people’s expectations about how we should dress, how we should act, who we should love, how we should be defined in arbitrary cultural ways by the genitals we were born with. How painful it was to not be accepted simply for who we were and are.

Well, sure— I’ve lived through plenty of that myself. It’s just (usually) not quite so visceral to me anymore because it’s been many years since I came out, and I’ve been openly lesbian for most of that time.

But damned if I don’t remember the pressure to wear dresses that I never felt comfortable in, to be “feminine.” Or the fear I felt as a sophomore in college when an acquaintance wanted to talk with me about being lesbian and I frantically counted the very few friends who knew about me — who told her?

As I wrote in another post in 2009, shortly after the veto of the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO-64, about coming out when I was in college,

It was scary, it was painful, & it was a slow long job to learn who I could or could not trust with this important aspect of who I am. And as hateful as the “Truth is Not Hate” hate speech that we heard constantly spewed from the mouths of red-shirted ordinance opponents over the course of the summer, the sentiments they expressed were not so different from the conventional wisdom of the majority of my peers in the East Coast women’s liberal arts college I attended from 1977 to 1981. Yes: the same college that Hillary Rodham Clinton attended, a supposed bastion of liberalism.

Sitting in that meeting, I was sent back into those memories, and began to feel worse. In April 2009, when I started writing this post, I was just coming out of a lengthy period in the cave — the cave being my name for one of the varieties of “depression” (or sometimes plain old despair) I sometimes experience. The cave is probably why I didn’t finish the post at the time: I was afraid I’d go back into it. I was coming face to face, for the first time in a long time, with how deeply I was scarred by all that shit of a lifetime in homophobia-land, all the fear and distrust I had for the people around me simply because of who and what I was.

As far as I’ve come along from the all of that, I still have the scars. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve struggled with despair/depression off & on all my adult life — actually, dating back to my last couple of years of high school. For almost as long, I’ve tried to figure out what it was about, where it came from. There are other strands in my background that I can point to — most prominently, the effect on my mother, and through her me, of her having grown up with an alcoholic father — but the effect of growing up in a society that actively hated my difference, well… its hard to measure exactly. But it’s there.

And it goes far beyond me. How many friends have I had who’ve suffered similarly because the church, or their family, or their friends, or some combination of all of the above and then some, has been unable or unwilling to accept them on their own terms?

Bob, a coparticipant of mine in a high school enrichment program at University of Wyoming who, at age 17, jumped to his death from the 9th floor of White Hall, after having reportedly being harassed by other participants about being a “faggot.” My friend in college who was raped after a male visitor to our campus learned she was a lesbian. My friend up here in Alaska who at age 20 was gang-raped by eight men in his Army unit, then further raped with a broken bottle, for no other reason than that he was gay. Other friends and acquaintances who have gotten lost in drugs or booze, like my namesake Melissa who died of a heroin overdose in July 1983 just a few months after I arrived in Alaska. Other friends or acquaintances who have attempted, or succeeded with, suicide — at least two women in the Anchorage lesbian community that I can think of off the top of my head, and undoubtedly more. Other people I never knew but might have, had they not been murdered, like Raymond Barker, murdered by Charles Cole and Matthew Decker in April 1985; Oscar Jackson, murdered by William M. Justice in December 1984; or Peter Dispirito, murdered in August 1974 by Gary Lee Starbard, who received a sentence of just one year for — in the judge’s words — the “unfortunate accident — incident” that led to his victim’s death. (Dispirito is still remembered through a public service award bestowed annually by the Imperial Court of All Alaska.) By circumstance, this post follows the publication last night on Bent Alaska of Johnathan Jones’ post on the death of his foster sister by suicide. I share, we all share, his grief.

Self-hatred: it’s harm at the very center of us.

And it doesn’t only enter us due to overt acts of hatred against us, or even from hatred at all. I’d say in fact that the most common harm any human faces — the one that most harmed me — come from people who care about us. People who, well-intended, attempt to pressure and coerce us to behave according to arbitrary standards, rather than according to our integrity, our selfhoods as human beings. Strip away all the warnings about God’s commandments or What will Grandma and Grandpa, our friends, the neighbors, your schoolmates, the people at church think? — strip way all the reassurances that We’re saying this because we love you and It’s in your best interests: in the final analysis, it’s the harm that says: Your own account of yourself is meaningless; your feelings don’t count; you don’t count.

Who does not despair, violated in that way in the very core of who we are?

But if the harm is at our center, then so is the cure. The foundational step towards finding a way for myself that didn’t involve killing myself or hating myself was coming out and accepting and loving myself as a lesbian. I was 19 when I did that, a sophomore at Wellesley College. It took me a few years after that, but that first foundation ultimately gave me the strength to give up self-hatred altogether.

Love others as you love yourself. But first: love yourself. Trust yourself. Respect yourself. Walk easy in your skin. Let no one convince you to do otherwise.

Winter arrives

Mel Green — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 22:43:12 +0000

Winter is finally acting like winter in Anchorage: we got a decent dump of snow overnight & this morning. What better proof of that than that almost everybody was late to work this morning?

Or, better yet, with a couple of pics? I took these during my lunchtime while I nuked my lunch into warm edibility.

The pic above is a People Mover bus as seen through a corner of the UAA/APU Consortium Library as seen from my office in another part of the Consortium Library. The green plants are inside the library. The ones with snow on them are not. And there are reflections. I think it looks pretty cool. Or cold. But it might be confusing to some eyes.

This view is a little more straightforward. Or queerbackward. Whatever. Anyway, it doesn’t mix the eye up as much. It’s just as cold, but not as cool.

Happy winter, Anchorage!

The Daily Tweets, 2010-04-28: Guns on campus

Mel Green — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 05:45:31 +0000

On April 28, 2010, the Alaska chapter of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus and the Anchorage 2nd Amendment Task Force demonstrated on the University of Alaska Anchorage campus against University of Alaska Regents Policy and UA regulations which prohibit carrying firearms on UA campuses. Four protesters openly carried firearms, were cited by University Police Department officers, and were asked to leave campus, which they did peacefully. I’ll be writing a “real” blog post about this in the next coupla days. Update: In fact, I didn’t. Instead I got skankthrax, & then recalibrated.

UAA Green & Gold: Peaceful protest against UA Regents policy prohibiting carrying of firearms on UA campuses Wed AM http://bit.ly/9XsAFn #fb #
RT: @celticdiva: Campus “carry” protest–gun nuts want to open-carry weapons // They want to _concealed_ carry ultimately. #
UAA Campus Response team just sent out email alert to campus re: armed pro-concealed carry protest. Same alert as from today’s Green & Gold. #
UAA faculty member told me faculty consider concealed carry of guns in classes as a hostile workplace issue. #fb #
As a 20-year UAA staff member, I agree w/ UAA faculty: handguns on campus is hostile workplace & workplace safety issue. #fb #

[Note: After being challenged by a couple of contacts on my Facebook page, my opinion has been changed on the "hostile workplace" claim -- but I still consider it a workplace safety issue.]

UAA admin & University Police Dept IMO doing good job of being proactive to prevent disruption by gun rightists during UAA exam week. #fb #
RT: @katsylver: South must do things in more of an asshole manner then AK. // Remember Eddie Burke. #
@alaskacommons: best i can tell, they’re breaking Regents’ Policies, but might not be actually breaking Alaska Statutes. #
RT: jansonjones Guns! Geese! Freedom! http://bit.ly/9xhvdO // Freedom’s just another word for / nothin’ left to goose. #
Stupid damn Echofon is malfunctioning again…. #
Had to uninstall & reinstall Echofon to get it to stop malfunctioniong. #
RT: @jansonjones: Campus Pro-Gun Rally Totally Peaceful, No Grass Trampled http://bit.ly/ccpxcr // See comments @ PA http://bit.ly/acmuAj #
Comments at Progressive Alaska by Jim give early report on 2nd Amendment rally at UAA http://bit.ly/acmuAj #
Alaska Dispatch report on UAA gun protest (h/t @jansonjones) http://bit.ly/bHBAPM #
RT: @adndotcom: 4 people cited by UAA police at campus gun-ban protest (photo). http://bit.ly/dwxC0E #
RT: @jansonjones: I missed the whole gun thing, but not for lack of trying. I did meet a pissed off goose though. // Did UPD cite it? #

Snowfall

Mel Green — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:33:07 +0000

We got some more this morning. I don’t mind….

Snowfall

One night in front of the high school, under a streetlamp,
white flakes fall noiselessly.

If language must have tongue and voice
then you, tongueless, voiceless,
say nothing. There is nothing to say.
You do not fall to fulfill a promise: you have spoken no promise.
You do not fall to answer a command: none has commanded.

But you fall: fall from the sky,
cover the land, and whiten it.
Life leaves its tracks in you.

[March 31, 1996]

About the photo

Taken at first snow in October 2006 approaching the Consortium Library on the UAA campus. But for all that this morning’s snow added to the accumulation of what’s already been a long winter (& will continue to be — this is Alaska!), walking to work from the bus stop this morning looked pretty much like this.

The Daily Tweets, 2009-10-12: UAA moose

Mel Green — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:59:00 +0000

A snack between classes on the UAA campus, April 2005

Fall safety warning at UAA: “Should a moose cross your path – wait for it to move along or choose an alternate route.” #

Chugach Mountains from midtown. Hard to believe this is Oct. 12, & we've already seen termination dust. Now it's mostly melted away

Divorce, financially interdependent partner style

Blinks

Mel Green — Sat, 23 May 2009 22:00:39 +0000

On Facebook, my friend David has been thinking about blinks. He posted a brief little meditation about it a few days ago, & this morning a wonderful short poem called “Blinking” that I wish I could post here but I haven’t asked him so I won’t. But his poem led me to dig up a nonfiction piece I wrote many years ago, 1994, in an undergrad nonfiction workshop taught by Gretchen Legler at University of Alaska Anchorage. It’s about memory.

At the time of writing, my partner Rozz and I were early in our relationship, & had lived for about a year together in a small rented house in the Mountain View neighborhood of Anchorage — the first place we shared. My mom was still alive, & my parents still lived in the same house in Columbia Falls, Montana where I grew up. I still had my cats Lemminkäinen (Lem for short) & Eight Lives, & Rozz still had her dog Whylie. A lot has changed since then. Which makes the blinks described here, both of 1962 (or whenever) & 1994, all the more precious.

Blinks

I lie in a bed, warm. It’s my parents’ bed. I lie on my left side with my back to whoever lies in the bed with me. It might be my mom, or maybe it’s my dad. Maybe it’s both. But I can’t see them because they are behind me. The room is dark, but the door is open and light spills in from the next room. I hear voices from the next room, and feet, stamping. It’s my brothers, getting ready for school. Outside, I know, it’s raining.

This is my first memory, lying in my parents’ bed, warm, aware of other people’s presence — the weight of my mother or father behind me on the mattress, my brother’s voices — but seeing no one, seeing nothing but the dark room and the light coming from the next room. It’s as though I blinked into existence merely to collect this memory, and blinked out again once I’d retrieved it.

But I blink in equipped with some knowledge, for while there’s a lot I don’t know, there are some things I do. That I have brothers, for instance. I don’t see them, and while I hear their voices, they are blurry, indistinct, unsexed. I don’t know their names. But I know it’s them and I know they’re getting ready for school.

What is school? In my memory it’s merely a word to describe a place they go when they’re not here, where I am. And where is that? In my parents’ bed, but I’m not sure which house. I want to say it’s the big two-story house where my parents still live, but that may be only because it’s the only house I remember in detail. But my parents have told me we lived in a different house for the first few years after I was born, so it could be my first memory takes place in a room of that house. But they’ve pointed that house out to me — I’m certain it had only one floor. Yet I can’t hear the rain — surely in a one-story house I would hear the rain hitting the roof. So I must be in the big house, I must be in my parent’s bedroom where I slept in a crib till I was five, because there weren’t enough bedrooms to go around, because my dad hadn’t yet built the bedrooms in the attic.

But why am I in my parent’s bed, not in my crib? Maybe I was crying in my sleep and Mom or Dad came and got me to comfort me, and my blinking into this scene was my waking up. But no, there’s no sense of sadness or discomfort as I lie there, nothing to indicate I was, or had been, distressed. Maybe one of my parents got me up for the day, brought me out of the bedroom for breakfast, or to the bathroom — surely I’m out of diapers by now — and when I got done, I found my other parent still in bed and jumped in, wanting to cuddle. Yes — and that would explain how I know it’s raining — I’ve been about in the house, I’ve seen the rain out the window.

I feel like a detective. Why am I aware of my brothers and not my sister? She was born before me — she must be around somewhere. In my early childhood she and my brothers shared the bedroom next to our parents’ room. She slept in an old-fashioned trundle bed, a little bed on casters that was rolled under my brothers’ bunk beds during the day. Maybe I’m not aware of her because she’s not getting ready for school. Maybe she doesn’t go to school yet. And if that’s so . . . I can learn how old I am. Mer is just a year younger than Mark, so if he’s going to school and she isn’t, he must be in first grade. That would make him 6 years old, and Mer 5. Dave would be 10. And I would be 3. It would be 1962, a rainy fall day, far away in Montana where my parents still live, in the house they still live in, in the room that long ago, after Dad built the upstairs bedrooms, turned into the “sewing” room, then the “utility” room, then finally — more honestly — the “junk” room.

But in 1962 it was the bedroom, my parents’ and mine, and I lie on my left side seeing the dark of the room and the light of the next room and hearing the voices and feeling . . . how? Not distressed, that’s been established. But I don’t feel ecstatic, either, not transcendent or joyful or anything one would consider so remarkable as to pop me into existence to experience that moment. I just feel . . . okay. Warm. Comfortable. Dry. Secure. Like so many moments of my life it’s a moment I imagine someone outside myself would find endlessly dull and prosaic, but to me it’s fascinating, something I return to.

As I will return to this morning. Rozz has already gotten up, gotten dressed, made breakfast, made lunch, and written some in her journal. Now she comes in to snuggle with me for a few minutes where I lie on my right side, facing toward the window with its venetian blinds, my right hand tucked under Lem’s warm purring belly. My other boy, Eight Lives, regard me with benevolence from atop my left shoulder. Probably he’s purring, too. Rozz is behind me, her left arm thrown over my waist, her breath in my hair. Whylie, her dog, is probably behind her somewhere, on the other side of the bed.

I know it’s raining outside because I can hear it — we live in a one-story house. I feel wonderful and lazy, except I know in a minute Rozz will tell me what time it is. Then she’ll get up and take Whylie out for a quick walk, and I’ll have to get up and get dressed and put on my shoes and wash my hair and comb it and be ready, by the time Rozz gets back with Whylie, to drive us both to work. I’m not so lucky as the little girl of 32 years ago, who gets to lay about warm and sleepy while others go out to the work of the world. But until it blinks out, there is this moment.

[October 6, 1994]

Divorce, financially interdependent partner style

Mel Green — Sat, 16 May 2009 02:16:55 +0000

Rozz slicing apples for pie, Thanksgiving 2005

Today is the final day of the University of Alaska system’s annual Open Enrollment period, when we have the opportunity to make changes to the various options in our benefits package. And so it came to formalize what Rozz, now Ptery, & I had come to agree to — that we’re not quite partners anymore. So, with the simple filling out of my Health Plan Enrollment Form removing Rozz (still his legal name) as my financially interdependent partner… well. There it is. Filled it out, walked in the rain to the University Lake Building where our HR office is nowadays, & made it official.*

Is this how heterosexual couples feel when they get copies of their final divorce papers? Surely at least those who still love each other but for whom circumstance or life paths have led them in different directions, as happened with us.

Rozz & met in January 1993, moved in with each other later that year, & became financially interdependent partners (FIPs) as soon as the university made the program available, sometime in the mid-1990s. To become FIPs, we had to fill out a form checking off on a number of statements establishing our relationship to one another, & also had to meet at least five criteria (for example, having a joint checking account) which established proof that we were financially interdependent.

What did this get us? As stated in the University of Alaska’s explanation of its FIP policy:

financially interdependent partners and their dependent children will be provided the same benefits as those provided to married spouses and their dependent children, except where expressly prohibited by law. All University of Alaska Policies and Regulations and benefit plan documents that affect employees, spouses and their families also apply to employees and their financially interdependent partner and dependent children.

Through the FIP program, then, Rozz had access to UA-provided health benefits, along with other benefits such as the employee tuition waiver, which enabled Rozz to take classes at UAA. (I used the employee tuition waiver myself to finance my masters’ degree.) Had we legally adopted Rozz’s nephew Jesse, he also would have come under my benefits. (As it happens, it proved too legally complex to put through an adoption; & he fortunately had health insurance through other means.)

Our benefits weren’t exactly at the same level as for our legally married heterosexual counterparts, however. For one thing, unlike for married folks, the value of the benefits that Rozz received count as income for me — so I had to pay additional taxes on them.

Rozz eating pie, Thanksgiving 2005

Not quite the same as marriage, then.

But for all that, it was the closest thing we had to a legal recognition and honoring of our commitment & love for one another.

And so filling out my Health Plan Enrollment Form removing Rozz as my FIP is the closest representation we have of a “divorce.”* (It also, to my great regret, means that Rozz-now-Ptery no longer has any health insurance at all. C’mon, President Obama & Congress, we need universal health coverage now!)

I picked these particular photos for this blog post because my memories of Rozz making that apple pie on a beautiful snowy Thanksgiving Day in 2005 is one of memories that went through my head as I walked in the rain to University Lake Building at lunchtime today, feeling pretty rainy inside myself. Thanksgiving 2005 was a beautiful snowy winter day, & I remember Jesse (who is partially seen behind Rozz in the upper right pik) spending some time outside with the neighbor shoveling driveways & throwing snow up in the air that the neighbor’s dog would jump up into. Later, after the pies were done, we headed across town to have Thanksgiving dinner with Mark (my brother) & Linda & Lauren & Miles — finishing off with pumpkin, pecan, & Rozz’s apple pie.

It was a wonderful day. I miss days like those, & all the other days & nights that we spent together as friends, lovers, & partners over the past 16 years. I feel lucky to have spent so much of my life with you, my love. Knowing I’ll have less income tax to pay next April 15 is only partial recompense for not being able to spend more years the same.

Postscript: By coincidence, just as I was finishing up this post, I got a call from Ptery, who just came into cellphone range again after a week & a half out of it. I told him the news of our ex-FIPness & about the blog post I was writing, & the sadness I was feeling. But also, how glad I am that he’s happy doing what he’s doing & following the life he’s chosen. With or without marriage or FIP, whether or not we live together or are partners, the love is still there, strong as ever. And that feels pretty good.

——-

* Found out later I need also to sign a “Termination of Financially Interdependent Partnership” form in front of an official UA HR representative, so I’ll trot back over to University Lake Building on Monday & do it.