Our Stories, Our Voices

by Amy Reed (ed)

  Which was part of what made it so surprising when I came over to her house to see her, at twenty years old, and told her I was in a relationship with a girl, and she looked at me like her world had dropped out from under her. I’d been with girls for a year; she really didn’t know?

  Or was it that it really took her nineteen years to come to terms with having a Jewish child, and I hadn’t yet given her that for having a queer one?

  Seriously, nineteen fucking years?

  I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot lately. About the people she came from, who either didn’t notice (her theory) or intentionally chose (you gotta wonder . . .) to give her the initials they gave her. About where she grew up and what she was told. And how, despite all that, she married my father. She knit pink hats for the Women’s March in 2017. She has stood beside me and cheered “Black lives matter” like she was someone who was not raised to believe that they did not.

  I think about the discomfort on her face when I want to talk about anti-Semitism. It’s very hard for her to accept that that is still happening in the world, because she was raised on a diet of steady, subtle racism, not hate crimes. I can’t ever tell her about getting harassed online, because her immediate question is, What did you do? because she has never been a target simply for existing. She’s not present online the way I am. She doesn’t know people outside of our liberal community and her mother, whom she very rarely speaks to.

  A few years ago, when her father was dying, she had to go down to North Carolina a lot. Her parents had a nasty divorce—he was a Connecticut liberal; I honestly don’t know how they lasted five minutes around each other, never mind a twenty-five-year marriage—but, ever the devoted daughter, my mother still stayed at my grandmother’s house when she went down to see her dad. More often than not, the trips would involve them screaming at each other about politics, and my mother would come home insecure, asking me if I really liked her haircut, because her mother had spent all week criticizing it. I fall apart when my mother criticizes me too, but that’s just about the only similarity in our relationships.

  My mother has come so far.

  But then she asks me what I did to deserve getting harassed online, and she rolls her eyes if someone mentions the Holocaust, and she stands there gaping when I tell her I’m dating a girl . . .

  I get so mad.

  She was a stay-at-home mom. She did PTA. She packed my lunch every day all through high school. I love my dad with everything in me, but between her and my sister and the incredible women I have dated, I am a woman who has been grown by women.

  (This, by the way, is why I will never understand women who say they “don’t need feminism” while they sit on the shoulders of women who did, but okay.)

  My mom has come so far. Look at that shitty town in North Carolina. Look at what they named her. Look at the generations and generations and generations of people who never would have looked twice at my father, or worse.

  She did not think, when she married my father, that she would have kids who’d get death threats for having his last name, but I do. I have a block list on Twitter thirteen thousand names long, and I still get a few threats a week for my sin of being online with my name. My mother’s on Twitter now too, with our last name, and I worry about her. Nothing’s happened to her yet.

  And she will fight for gay rights all day long, but she never thought it would be for the baby she carried and brought home from the hospital and made lunches for every day. I know. It’s hard for me to understand my queerness as a shock, but I try to think about if I have children, what ways they’ll have to shock me. What they’ll discover about themselves that right now I don’t even know is an option.

  I want my mother to be perfect. But more than that, I want her to be enough. I want all of the work that she’s done, all of the incredible growing up she has had to do alone—my mother is a woman who was grown into the amazing person she is by and large by one woman and that woman is herself—to be enough, because maybe she can’t do any more. She has come so, so far.

  She just has this daughter she wasn’t prepared for.

  And isn’t that kind of what’s happening to a lot of us right now?

  My mother was not prepared for me. And it was a lot easier to judge her for that before this year. Because I was not prepared. And unless someone has every possible intersection of every possible marginalized person, there is something going on right now that they were not prepared for either.

  At the Women’s March, beside my mother, I looked around at signs about refugees and the Dakota Access Pipeline. I talk to teenagers on Twitter who are struggling to have their genders and sexualities validated and protected. These are the people that I was not expecting in my life. These are the mothers and sisters and daughters that I was not trained for. I might be more marginalized than my mother, but I’m more privileged than a lot of others. And I might not be related to the people I trip over when I fail to use the right words or see things from the right perspective, but that doesn’t make my mistakes less hurtful.

  What if I can’t be good enough either?

  But I have to be. I have to be better.

  Look at how far my mother came. Look at the head start I have.

  I am on the shoulders of every single woman who came before me. I am on the strong, sign-wielding back of a woman who did so much heavy lifting, who overcame so much shit, to start me off in a place where I can nitpick her advocacy.

  Which I will do, at the same time I appreciate her, because this is my job. This is what daughters have to do. We have to go even further. Be even better. And teach the next ones to be better than us. This is the definition of progress.

  Hundreds of years in the future, when some girl is doing her genealogy, make her goddamn proud.

  AN ACCIDENTAL ACTIVIST

  Ellen Hopkins

  If you follow me on social media, you know I’m a political beast. I make no bones about how I lean, which is hard to the left. I’m a staunch believer in the equal rights our Constitution affords every American, regardless of religion, skin color, country of origin, gender, or sexual identity. And if our president and congresspersons don’t represent every one of us equally, I am willing to openly and vocally call them out, or take to the streets and march, if required. Activism is second nature to me. That might not surprise you. But how I became engaged with it just might.

  Honestly, I define “white privilege.” I was adopted as a baby by an older couple. My dad was seventy-two and my mom was forty-two when they brought me home from the hospital where I was ushered into this world. Daddy, the son of German immigrants, was born in San Francisco in 1883. His family was poor and so was his education, which only went through the sixth grade. But he was a brilliant man and willing to work hard, something he did every day of his life until he passed away at eighty-seven years old. Over his lifetime he set a world record in the long jump, invented a bookkeeping system, and built several businesses. One of those was a steel-manufacturing company that provided necessary resources to the government during World War II, and with it came a fair amount of money. My father defined “self-made man” and the American dream.

  We weren’t Rockefeller rich, but we lived comfortably in an affluent Palm Springs, California, neighborhood. To escape the sweltering summer heat, we traveled north to Napa and Lake Tahoe. My childhood passions, which my parents supported, were horses, dance, and books, in that order. We attended church every Sunday. Our regular congregations were Presbyterian and Lutheran, but sometimes we’d attend Catholic or Baptist services, and my best friend in grade school was Jewish, so once in a while I’d tag along to her synagogue. There was never a concept of “one true religion” in our home.

  I went to an exceptional non-parochial private school, with excellent teachers who encouraged critical thinking skills. Looking back, I see that three of my favorites happened to be gay men, but I had no clue about that then. It wasn’t something people talked about in the sixties, certainly not aro
und children. Nor was it a badge worn out and proudly. Gay people stayed in their closets, except in certain urban areas where they felt safe among their brothers and sisters.

  Neither was I very aware of the Civil Rights Movement occurring around the country. While I’d learned a little about the Civil War and slavery, I’d had no idea about the escalating African-American fight for social justice in the intervening years. As a child of white privilege, the violence and fear Black kids faced every day in their own neighborhoods was a foreign concept to me. It had never touched me. I’d never seen it. It was as if we lived on different planets.

  The only political event I knew about in grade school was John F. Kennedy’s assassination. America’s thirty-fifth president served less than three years before Lee Harvey Oswald shot him on November 22, 1963. The United States was at odds (verging on war) with the Soviet Union and Cuba, so some people believed one or the other was behind a bigger plot. Others thought the Mafia, the CIA, or even Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson might have played a role, though investigators concluded Oswald acted alone. Regardless, the trajectory of this country changed with JFK’s death. Many historians agree he likely would’ve sought a diplomatic solution to the Vietnam conflict, while his successor escalated the war.

  I was eight years old on that November day, so while I understood the basic details, the speculation about motives was completely lost on me. My parents might have discussed it, and I’m sure the nightly news played in the background, but the importance of that moment in time was something I came to understand later.

  My parents were Republicans. My dad was a businessman, after all. But they weren’t overtly political. Rarely did I hear them talk about elections or candidates or how they felt about the draft that was sending boys to Vietnam in the sixties. My first real taste of politics came in the eighth grade, when we did mock elections. We drew names of candidates to research, and my pick was Robert F. Kennedy, John’s younger brother. The year was 1968.

  I learned that Bobby Kennedy served as JFK’s attorney general, and in that role he advocated for the civil rights of African-Americans. In 1962, he sent federal troops to Oxford, Mississippi, to enforce a US Supreme Court order admitting the first Black student, James Meredith, to the University of Mississippi. The state’s segregationist governor, Ross Barnett, had tried to bar Meredith, whose enrollment provoked demonstrations at the school. Bobby also worked, first with his brother and then with President Lyndon Johnson, on the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in voting, employment, and public facilities.

  This was my introduction to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, as well as to major players, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. It was my first clear realization of the struggle for racial parity in a country that was supposed to guarantee equal rights for all.

  On the day MLK was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to give a campaign speech in inner-city Indianapolis. Despite fear of violence, he broke the news of Dr. King’s death and comforted the largely Black audience with what has been called one of the great public addresses of the modern era. He acknowledged and honored their anger, but reminded them of King’s own efforts to “replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”

  His words resonated with a girl on the brink of adolescence, as did the marches and protests and even the riots that inevitably followed. At thirteen, I became a Democrat because Bobby Kennedy spoke about things my heart insisted were true. And when he was gunned down in June of that year, his death affected me deeply. He died for what he believed in. That powerful message resonated, but I never confessed this to my parents.

  My dad, for all his many fine traits, was undeniably the “king of his castle.” His generation held more respect for men than for women, who weren’t welcomed into the workforce, except in certain specific roles: teachers, nurses, secretaries. My mother, in fact, met my father when she applied for a receptionist job at his factory. He was a widower, having lost his wife of forty years to lung cancer. Mama, who had worked as a nurse/caretaker for two decades, was in need of a job after her longtime patient passed away. Daddy was lonely. Mama was hungry. He was powerful. She was deferential. I can’t speak to romance, but somehow they agreed to marry.

  It was a rocky relationship. My father was what I call a weekend alcoholic. Didn’t touch a drop from Sunday morning until Friday evening, when he’d start drinking and stay mostly drunk through Saturday night. Regardless, he’d be up on time for church. Weekdays were relatively quiet, but alcohol-fueled arguments were common on Daddy’s days off, and those were the only times I ever heard my mom voice opinions that ran counter to her husband’s. Women were supposed to be seen and not listened to.

  But I loved listening to her. Our shared pastime was horseback riding, and on long desert jaunts, she’d tell me about her history or confide aspirations. Had she lived in another time, she would have accomplished great things, I believe. I remember an invention of hers, dreamed up to save time in the kitchen. But she didn’t have the resources to actually patent and build trash compactors, which appeared several years later. My mom was bright, funny, and compassionate. That I was one of the few people who were allowed to see those things in her confounded me. And to witness her societally programmed obedience to my father’s will likely sparked my early resistance to the concept of male dominion.

  Mama also loved literature, especially the classics, though she was not above enjoying a bit of pulp fiction from time to time. She inspired my love of reading, and never censored a thing. In fact, she encouraged me to read widely, knowing books would open my eyes to a world much larger than the relatively protected one in which we lived. I pored through chapter books before kindergarten. By sixth grade, I devoured everything from Lord of the Rings to Lord of the Flies.

  Once I hit high school, it was anything I could get my hands on, and in digesting classics like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, it dawned on me how women have been pigeonholed throughout history. More modern, and even sexier fare, including Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and Pauline Réage’s Story of O, showed me that women could choose not only to embrace their gender, but also use it to accomplish their goals. This made me confront the uncomfortable concept of patriarchy within religion, something I struggled to reconcile with the idea of an all-accepting God. As I came to terms with this, and also embraced my awakening sexuality, I decided that the time had come to break free of tradition. Feminism was taking root, not only in society but also in me.

  High school, in fact, is where I first fell into activism. We had moved to the Santa Ynez Valley the summer after I graduated from the eighth grade. It was, and remains, quintessential small-town California—rolling hills and oak trees, ranch land (much of which is now planted in vineyards), and perfectly pretty neighborhoods. Almost all the kids in the high school had known one another since childhood, which put newcomer me on the fringes of the student body. I didn’t mind so much. Despite being a straight-A student, “mainstream” didn’t appeal to me.

  Truthfully, I was born a rebel, and my teen years illustrate that. Sometimes I ditched classes, and I got really good at forging absence slips. (Luckily, I didn’t need lectures to ace tests.) I was comfortable with my body and didn’t mind displaying it at nude beaches and swimming holes. (“Look, but don’t touch” was the rule, and my German shepherd enforced it.) I preferred hanging out with guys to having sex with them (with a couple of notable exceptions). Okay, I smoked weed (but it was rare for me to drink alcohol).

  I chose to avoid alcohol because, at home and outside of it, I saw how drinking to excess could make men aggressive and women compliant. I was determined to remain on equal footing with the guys in my life and was fortunate to find male companions who accepted my parameters. One of them, whom I loved very much, was killed in a drunk driving accident. At sixteen,
I suffered real loss for the first time. My dad passed away not long after, and my mom’s subsequent tailspin proved how dependent on him she was. I vowed never to be totally reliant on a partner, and I’m proud to have managed that over the years. I’ve made mistakes, but nothing I couldn’t recover from.

  Rebel or no, I did manage to make some amazing friends and go out with some very cute guys. A couple of those friends lost brothers in the Vietnam War, which was in its waning years at the time. Still, several boys who were close to me were sweating the draft. I’ll never forget them waiting for the Selective Service lottery that put them in danger of being forced into the armed services and shipped overseas. The evening news showed footage of men conscripted to kill or be killed in the jungles of Indochina. We saw graphic photos of bombed villages, fallen soldiers, and massacred villagers.

  In the years since, the role of television coverage in the public debate about the Vietnam War has been dissected again and again. It was the first American conflict where some 90 percent of the country’s households owned TVs, and as primitive as the technology was, still we were escorted, via the screen, to a war-ravaged part of the world few enough of us would otherwise see. Some claim media spin was responsible for the surge in anti-war sentiment. Others insist that without the undeniable evidence of events like the Mai Lai Massacre (where American soldiers eliminated a village of South Vietnamese civilians) such atrocities would have continued. What can’t be denied is that visual connection brought the human element of combat into clear focus.

  There were anti-war rallies across the country, people rising up in protest of what they felt was an unjust conflict. I admired the shared vision and their willingness to go to jail if that’s what it took to be heard. On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced the US invasion of Cambodia. This led to massive demonstrations, including one on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio. On May 4, students armed only with sticks and rocks clashed with Ohio State National Guardsmen, who opened fire, killing four young protestors and wounding nine. When I heard this news it was like being punched in the gut, though I didn’t know any of the victims personally. And it was there this accidental activist was born. I was fifteen.