by Fay Jacobs
Was she on the Rehoboth Beach Diet, evil twin to the South Beach Diet?
Friends and relatives are here, rushing to take advantage of the waning summer and one more funnel cake. And friends don’t let friends pig-out alone.
So it’s with a delightfully sugary aftertaste that I sit on a boardwalk bench and ponder how different this August is. I am riveted to the news, because there actually is news.
While POTUS (walkie-talkie Homeland Security shorthand for President of the United States) pedals around his Crawford, Texas ranch, piddling away the entire month of August, one woman is starting a revolution.
Cindy Sheehan, if you haven’t heard of her, went down to Crawford to ask the President what her cherished son was fighting for when he lost his life in Iraq. All this grieving and angry woman wanted to do is have a few minutes of face time with the president of the United States. She gave up her son for her country and she wants to ask her country’s leader to explain why.
Seems like a reasonable request to me. The Prez dissed her. He couldn’t hop off his bike and have a conversation with her?
By day ten of her vigil, he hadn’t.
Regardless of your political leanings or ideology, it’s public relations 101 to get out in the open and explain yourself. Hiding and obfuscating is never, ever a winning strategy.
So an amazing thing is happening down there in Texas. Other mothers of fallen soldiers, or dads, or friends, or people just fearing they will lose loved ones in Iraq are showing up in Crawford to support Cindy Sheehan. And the camp has a name: Camp Casey, after the son Cindy lost to the Iraqi insurgency.
The thing is, thanks to the bizarre refusal of POTUS to act presidential, preferring instead to hide and obfuscate, there’s a growing backlash igniting a fervent anti-war movement where only a fledgling one existed. Camp Caseys are cropping up all over the country, as groups in other cities hold vigils and rallies in honor or Cindy and in memory of Casey.
Of course, talking TV heads on the Fox Network are having a field day sliming the reputation of Cindy Sheehan with talk of her divorce and other family issues to make her look pathetic and unpatriotic.
And the Rovian PR machine has recruited the Swift Boat Women’s Auxilliary for Truth with another mother who lost a son in the mid-east to call Cindy unpatriotic.
It reminds me of two bumper stickers I saw this week and one local story.
One bumper sticker said “Support Our Troops, Bring them Home.” The other said “Dissent is patriotic.”
Has it occurred to anybody else that our current political climate once again denigrates dissenters and calls anti-war activists or their sympathizers unpatriotic? Didn’t we learn that lesson more than 30 years ago?
Cindy Sheehan is camped in Crawford because she supports our troops and wants to make certain that the cause they are fighting for really is in the best interest of our country and its people. Okay, she disagrees with the President’s policies. Does that mean he should disregard her and send his minions to mount a PR campaign to trash her? Come on, people, the least our commander in chief should do is talk to her.
But refusing the recognize dissenters has become our national game plan. It’s happening right here in Delaware.
According to News Journal columnist Al Mascitti, disagreeing with Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum almost landed two local teenagers in jail.
Santorum, you see, is promoting, among other nonsense, the theory that gay marriage will lead to legalized bestiality. What can I say here? How can a single comment, or a paragraph of comments adequately relay my disgust at being so marginalized that Santorum thinks I’d throw over my spouse for a romp in the hay with a goat?
But Santorum the great thinker, held a book signing at a Barnes & Noble in Wilmington last week. He also invited people to chat with him at the signing.
Apparently, two teens wanted to ask Santorum about his views and tell him that they respectfully disagreed with his positions, specifically against women working outside the home, against birth control and oh, yeah, the goat thing. When Santorum’s handlers heard there might be two youngsters asking him about his views, he asked security to have them removed—with threats of jail time if they didn’t leave. Hello, is this still America where we have freedom of speech? If Santorum is free to publish his cockamamie ideas, aren’t readers free to say they disagree??? Santorum doesn’t seem to think so.
“These are all honor students,” one of the parents said. “I don’t know when they passed a law in Delaware that said you can’t have a cup of coffee and discuss your opposition to a book.”
Al Mascitti said, “They haven’t, but give them time.” I share his fear. The way we are going, goats in Delaware will have protection from discrimination before gay people. Maybe we should follow Cindy Sheehan’s example, pitch a tent at the state house, and ask the Democratic Senate Leadership to come out and talk to us.
Bet they wouldn’t.
Its time to get our heads up out of the sand here at the beach or simply in front of TV reality shows, and pay attention. There’s a lot more going on this August than one woman swallowing 35 sausages.
September 2005
23 HOURS IN THE BIG APPLE
We sat on the sofa, fighting to keep our eyes open. 11:02 p.m. It’s one thing to doze during Law and Order, but for this show we needed to stay uncharacteristically conscious. When the program finally came on, we still didn’t know if this was “our” episode or not.
Back in July, we had a whirlwind trip to NYC to be interviewed for the PBS show In the Life. If you haven’t seen this monthly news show, you should try to find it. Good luck. The show has been running 13 years, but PBS affiliates get to hide it anywhere they want on the schedule, if they run it at all. I can’t imagine it coming on in South Dakota. If it does make it to the schedule, it’s at 11 pm, midnight or even 3 a.m. when they figure big bigots and their little bigots are sound asleep, revving up for the following day’s homophobia. You got it—In The Life is about our lives; gay people. It’s our news.
But with the emergence of Digital Video Recorders, I never miss an episode.
That’s good, because when the producer asked if I wanted to be interviewed on the show, I didn’t say “Hey, what?” and sound like a nincompoop from the provinces. The producer had read my book and wanted to include me and my spouse in a series of interviews about coming out. “Can the two of you come up to New York on Friday, if that’s not too much trouble?”
A tax-deductible trip to the Big Apple is my kind of trouble.
We raced up the Jersey Turnpike early Friday morning, making it to New York’s “trés gay” Chelsea Pines Inn on 14th Street in record time. The proprietor happens to be my high school boyfriend who’s trés gay himself. We’re still trying to figure out what was in the water on prom night that turned both of us queer.
So we checked in and shopped until the appointed interview hour. Despite being in the city of my culinary fantasies we spurned glorious New York pizza (a completely different food group than Delaware pizza), chocolate egg creams, and a street corner falafel, for fear of blotching our interview clothes. You just know a glob of oozy, gooey cheese would have leapt onto our continental shelves.
So it was with nervous and growling stomachs that we arrived at the Fifth Avenue offices of In the Life.
The producer ushered me into the studio first, wired me for sound (got those stomach gurgles?) and leapt right into it.
“How did you tell you parents you were gay? How did they react? Set the scene for us. Do you remember how that made you feel?”
Did I ever. Like it was yesterday, not almost a quarter of a century ago. I remember phoning my father to tell him that Bonnie and I were buying a house together. He begged me not to buy a place “with another girl,” insisting “You’ll never find a husband that way. What do you want to go and do that for?”
Sweat emerged on my forehead as Bonnie stood across the room, flailing her arms and mouthing “Tell him, dammit, just tel
l him.”
Finally I blurted, “I’m buying the house with Bonnie because, um, we want to spend the rest of our lives together…um, as a couple, uh, if you know what I, um, mean.” It wasn’t my glibbest moment.
“I…think…I…do,” said Dad.
“Well, how do you feel about this news?” I asked, not really wanting to know and wondering why I asked.
His answer, in total, was the phrase “Well…(deep breath) this IS 1982.”
Then he hollered to my stepmother, “Joan, can you get me a Scotch?” and we continued the conversation.
The producer probed. “How did you and Bonnie meet? What’s life like in Rehoboth? Are you proud of your life as a lesbian?”
And she didn’t want just the facts, ma’am. She wanted to know how all of it felt and what it meant to me. For a person used to coughing up words, I got mush-mouthed as she said “delve, delve” like a submarine captain yells “dive, dive.”
So I bared my soul for 45 minutes.
When it was Bonnie’s turn she told some pretty shocking tales of her own coming out amid 1970s military witch hunts. She recounted her first softball game followed by her first visit to a gay bar and the woman with big blue eyes who made her come out to her 18-year-old self.
We’d spent a combined 90 minutes under the lights for the interview, which was more like a free therapy session.
And when it was over, we grabbed a corned beef sandwich, stopped in for a drink at the Stonewall Inn and headed off to a night of wine, women and song.
So two months later, we’re sitting in front of the TV at 11 o’clock at night, fighting to stay conscious for our 15 minutes of fame. And then we saw it. My face. My very round face, taking up most of the 27 inch TV screen and looking, well, puffy. The old tale that TV adds ten pounds is true. It added it all in my jowls. I looked like Gloria Swanson getting ready for her close-up but with slightly less eyeliner.
But wait. I was talking. There it was, the recounting of the phone call with Dad, all magnificent 45 seconds of it. Blip, the camera blacked out and came up on Bonnie, bigger than life and talking about the woman with the blue, blue eyes. She looked less jowly than I did, but I think the ten pounds were in her eyebrows. By the time I blinked we were onto a PBS fundraising pitch.
That was it? An hour and a half of true confessions in 90 seconds? Fifteen minutes of fame readjusted for inflation?
We glimpsed ourselves again when the program came back on, little head shots in a film strip type graphic on the screen. I was right next to a picture of Kate Clinton, the episode’s host. She must be very thin, because she did not look at all puffy.
Well, the trip to NY had been herds of fun we agreed. Then we crashed for the night.
The next day the phone rang.
“We saw you on TV,” said my stepmother Joan, “you looked wonderful. And I remember that phone call you talked about.”
“I didn’t really ask for a Scotch, did I?” asked my father.
“Yes, actually you did.”
“And we told all our friends to watch,” said Joan, “And they did. I’ve gotten several calls saying ‘We saw Fay on television last night.’ Everyone has been so complimentary.”
Well, one thing is certain. Fame may be fleeting but a heck of a lot of attitudes have changed for the better since 1982. Bonnie and I know we have been very lucky to be able to experience so much more unqualified acceptance and so much less dispiriting discrimination than our friends Anyda and Muriel, those grand Rehoboth icons, did when they were in their heyday. We can only imagine what valuable contributions, besides the Sarah Aldridge novels, Anyda and Muriel could have made in the struggle for gay equality if they had been able to be open about their incredible journey and their glorious same sex marriage.
Mr. DeMille, we’re all ready for our close-ups now.
September 2005
LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH
HURRICANE MARY JANE
With the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina playing on TV or in my head 24 hours a day, it’s impossible to think of a light-hearted thing to say.
I’ve been picturing our gulf coast sister resorts, families in crisis, folks who lost everything and pets left behind.
I hope my favorite gay bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Café Lafitte in Exile, is still there. Just as I hope its regulars, who loved to sip that now eerily-named New Orleans drink, The Hurricane, got out safely, with places to stay and means to recover their lives.
Disasters make me think about connections and people. About counting my blessings.
And one of those blessings was a friend who rescued me. She didn’t swoop down in a helicopter and pluck me off a rooftop amid swiftly rising water, but she might as well have.
I showed up at age 30, on the doorstep of this liberal, socially conscious, recently widowed, heterosexual friend in her mid-fifties. I stood there with two cat-carriers (inhabited), the clothes on my back and the need for a place to reinvent myself.
She invited me to make a nest in a downstairs apartment in her Maryland home, and for four years Mary Jane and I had a grand time as she tried to teach me to cook, taught me to drink booze without mixers, proved absolutely non-judgmental in a hostile and homophobic world, and gave me the courage and good-natured push to come out of the closet.
In addition, she had Schnauzers. She gets alternating credit and blame for my Schnauzer fixation. My first dog, Max, was a birthday gift from her. Bonnie called him the gift that kept on giving. Sometimes she meant love, sometimes other things.
Actually, Mary Jane was pretty much responsible for Bonnie, too.
It was a windy March night in 1982 when Mary Jane would rather have had me stay home to share linguini, clam sauce and Cagney & Lacey, but she urged me to go out to a dance “and meet somebody for heaven’s sake.”
I did. But the rest may not have been history, because, as months went by, as much as I adored Bonnie, I was plagued with guilt just thinking about telling Mary Jane I was moving out. I was certain I couldn’t do it.
A short time later Mary Jane picked a terribly uncharacteristic fight with me over Margarita glasses left sticky, which quickly escalated to, “I think you better consider getting a place of your own.” I never asked and she never confessed, but we both knew she picked that fight so I’d be able to leave.
Bonnie and I stayed close to Mary Jane all these years, until she was frail, battered by disease (although still enjoying booze without mixers) and ready to go. She passed away at age 81 two weeks before Hurricane Katrina and took with her a large chunk of my heart.
But just as the subsequent New Orleans disaster sharpened my grief for her passing, it also urged attention to the important stuff.
Despite droning Katrina coverage, my rage at the inept and insensitive bureaucratic emergency response, and my sadness at losing my friend Mary Jane, I noticed the sun did shine in Rehoboth and we did have a Pride Festival on Sept.10 at our state park.
There, as I sat in my beach chair, hawking books, Bonnie shilling for me, our friend Marge arrived.
Marge is memorable. She had been Bonnie’s friend since 1968 military days (and you thought there were no gays in the military!). She is a back-to-the-land militant feminist, lesbian separatist; cowboy-hat and Southwestern jewelry-wearing, outspoken gem of a dyke. When we met we had nothing in common except Bonnie.
One day in the early 80s she showed up in our redneck Maryland town wearing a t-shirt with a drawing of, forgive me, hairy labia on it. Showing up in it at my house was shocking enough, but she wanted to go to the local diner wearing it. She reluctantly agreed to change when she saw me starting to hyperventilate.
But I remember her loudly proclaiming herself a “militant lesbian feminist” several times during dinner, to the total disgust of nuclear families at neighboring tables. Barely uncloseted, with still-smoldering internal homophobia, I was appalled. Damn, I’d like to go back to that silly community now and shout, “We’re queer! I’m here, Get a lif
e.”
It’s a funny thing about Marge. Bonnie and I sometimes went years without seeing her and then we’d run into her, by chance, at a D.C. March on Washington, amid 250,000 people. It happened in 1987 and then again in 1993 in the midst of a million people. And this was before cell phones made meeting up a breeze.
Sometimes Marge would pass through town, call and we’d have a meal together—and then we wouldn’t see her again for years. But there was always a special connection.
This time Marge found the surprise link. Several weeks before our Pride event she was deep in the woods at a lesbian retreat, dancing nekked and listening to women’s music, when she went back to her cabin to read for a while. She sat on her cabin steps. A friend sat nearby, book in hand as well.
She heard her friend chuckle.
“Whatcha reading?” Marge asked.
Her friend passed her the book.
Marge stared at the cover and whooped, “Oh my gawddess I know this gal!” She flipped through the pages, shaking her head and exclaiming, “I’m stunned, it’s about Fay and Bonnie-girl. Oh my gaaawwwwddess.”
So we got an e-mail asking about the book, telling us she was heading our way to attend the Nanticoke Indian Pow-Wow held every year near here, and arranging to meet at Pride.
At the festival we pow-wowed too, catching up and re-connecting. Marge was off to Arizona, to (can you guess?) an all-lesbian retirement community.
We sat and laughed. The sun shone. Couples, troupes, singles, dual mommies with strollers, people we knew and people we didn’t listened to music, shopped the vendors, made new connections and celebrated existing ones.
I am more determined than ever to celebrate those connections, cherish our friendships, and, as Suede sang here a few weeks ago, see the rose petals in life, not the thorns.
I had finished this column, having talked about connections until I was blue in the face, and was preparing to hit the “send” button to submit it to Letters, when an e-mail popped up.
“Hello you two wonderful womyn. It was so great visiting with you all at your pride event. It was the highlight of my trip. I absolutely love the connections we all make, and it’s especially great to have them for many, many years…may the fun continue. You’re always welcome to bask in the beauty of my new home in Arizona. Sleep well and love to you both. Marge.”
