by Fay Jacobs
Recent media blabfests focused on hideous school violence. So what does the network do? After talking in solicitous, hushed tones about the stress youngsters face after these incidents, they stick a microphone in front of a ten-year-old and ask him to describe the horrific images he sees when he closes his eyes.
“How frightened are you? Do you think you’ll ever put this tragedy behind you?” “Are you having trouble sleeping?” I’m against violence, except for the producer who put that report together.
And while I’m on a rant, I hate those special “crisis logos” TV stations use. Reeboks need logos; Wars do not. Are journalists afraid we’ll be bored just watching Brokaw read the news? Isn’t a shot of a bloody mangled car or a grainy security camera holdup scene good enough? Now we have to have some graphic designer’s concept of big stories. News logos set a new low standard for infotainment.
Racing for ratings, TV stations waited about three seconds into this latest mess to design “Election in Crisis” logos. Of course, how sensational do we get before news is science fiction? Or are we already there?
When a story breaks, that’s news. When there’s no more news to report, stations and newspapers should just shut up. Instead, they keep the story alive by interviewing self-described “experts” pontificating about what it will mean if we should actually hear something new.
Meanwhile, economic news gets 40 seconds, tobacco legislation is a blip, and there’s a tiny story about the Federal budget and tax revisions with no explanation whatever. But we sure as hell know more than we ever, ever wanted to know about Monica Lewinsky, O.J. Simpson and other tabloid superstars.
Amidst all the election result speculation last week I heard an NPR report that the Antarctic continental shelf is cracking, melting, and in danger of sending out icebergs that could one day sink civilization like the mighty Titanic.
We’ll still be hearing about Florida’s pregnant chads when they come through with bullhorns telling us to evacuate Delaware because Nebraska is going to be beachfront.
So I’m turning off the TV. I figure somebody will tell me if our country selects a president. In the meantime I’m off to the Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival. I’ve picked out eleven movies to see in four days, which will be my personal best. I have friends who have earmarked nineteen films to see. They will surely win the coveted Preparation H Award.
Next up will be the Rehoboth Hometown Christmas Parade. I always love that one. Every emergency vehicle in the county shows up, along with trash trucks decorated with reindeer antlers, and a bevy of twinkling tractors and farm vehicles rolling through town. It’s not Macy’s, but it’s ours.
So from our house to yours, enjoy your Thanksgiving, savor the holidays, and have a happy, healthy new year. See you for 2001, the (Presidential) Race Odyssey. I’m sure we’ll have a new leader by then. Won’t we?
February 2001
BE IN THE MOMENT
Okay, Dubya has now been sworn in. Along with the official and unofficial swearing, if we’ve heard one thing over the past few months since our national electile dysfunction, it’s that it’s a time for healing. We agree. We’ve begun with things that soothe.
First, ostensibly to help heal Bonnie’s knee injury, we ordered a new bathtub with whirlpool jets. Our original tub, when filled to its brim, would not cover Calista Flockhart much less one of us.
So the plumbers came, pulled out the teeny tub and set the new one in place. Then, the two butch plumbers, wearing dangerously low-riding blue jeans, explained that we needed to build a frame for the tub that extended at least six extra inches so “you have room to put the candles and wine glasses.” Oh???
“Yeah,” said the second plumber, “this should be the last thing you girls do each day so you can really relax and enjoy it.” It was a wonderfully surreal moment.
Unfortunately, when the two most sensitive plumbers in history turned the motor on to test the whirlpool, water spewed all over the floor, the plumbers and our hopes of a candlelit evening.
“O.K.” said the chief plumber, “while we arrange for replacement parts from the manufacturer, you can fill the tub, but don’t use the jets.”
That only sounded easy. First off, the faucet wasn’t installed, so water just dribbled out of the copper pipe. At this rate we’d have a bath for the 2004 inaugural (Go Hillary!).
Eager to get to the candles and wine, we grabbed our spaghetti pot and lobster steamer from the kitchen, started filling them with hot water from the sink and dumping them overboard into the tub. There hasn’t been so much running with pots of boiling water since Butterfly McQueen began birthing babies in Gone With The Wind.
By the time the tub was one third full, we uncorked the Merlot and figured that our ample body displacement would make up the difference. Just after we hopped in, the faucet’s dribble turned icy cold.
Then we became uncorked. We sat in 8 inches of water, realizing that our water heater had just hollered Uncle. Not only didn’t the tub’s plumbing work, but when it did get repaired we wouldn’t have enough hot water in the house to fill it. Great, our bargain spa needed a new water heater. Talk about taking a bath.
In the meantime, we hastily clinked glasses and climbed out of the tub—not as easy as we’d imagined either. Hauling ourselves up from the depths wasn’t pretty. I now understand the value of grab bars, if not ejection seats.
Hence, the next part of our quest for healing involved striving for more flexibility. We signed up for yoga class.
I’ve always suspected that yoga was way too California-wear-some-flowers-in-your-hair for me. I just couldn’t see myself quieting my brain or my mouth long enough to practice anything involving relaxation and patience. But alas, I was persuaded to go to a complimentary class.
Skeptical and scared of displaying my physical and mental inflexibility, I diffidently followed my mate into the studio —a room bathed in soft light and arranged with a dozen mats on the floor. Very kindergarten nap time.
As Yogameister Susan started her melodically soft-spoken instructions, I found myself going with the flow and coming as close to total relaxation as I’d ever imagined I could achieve.
So we signed up for a semester. Ours is the gentle yoga class, which is a polite way of saying it’s for the elasticity challenged. We each have our own particular infirmities, with some of us just suffering from too much Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey.
But yoga eschews judgment at every turn. At our next class I found out that nothing is a problem. If somebody can’t stretch far enough to achieve a specific position, a dowel in hand can bridge the gap. And you can roll blankets under any body part you want for comfort. Can’t reach far enough around your own thunder thighs to pull your knees to your chest? There’s a canvas belt available to help. I appreciated the assist, but I’m sure I looked like a piece of furniture cinched into place on a Bekins Van.
Of course, I shouldn’t have been thinking about how I looked, since I was supposed to be concentrating on my breathing and letting my brain and internal organs relax.
You know, it is possible to relax too much. Under the heading of “that’s okay, it’s supposed to happen,” certain yoga positions can, how shall I put this, cause …um… flatulence. I think everybody in our class, at one time or another, has produced an audible emission. I find myself watching what I eat for lunch on yoga days. I don’t think that praying you’ll get through the hour without breaking wind is the kind of meditation we’re encouraged to practice.
Anyway, when we did some bending movements, I was surprised to hear my instructor say I was very flexible. And not just my jaw, which I knew was in shape from blabbing. Apparently my waist and shoulders weren’t as unyielding as I’d thought, either. Gee, next time Bonnie and I are having a “discussion,” and I’m accused of being inflexible, I will have a retort.
This yoga stuff really is impressive. We’ve learned to be in the moment, concentrate on our breathing and try to calm the adrenalin rush of our daily lives. Aft
er stretching, comes quiet time, when Miss Susan reads to us. We all lie on our mats, surrounded by our blankies, dowels and belts, and, if we’d like, little black beanbag masks to block the light from our eyes.
I know I’m supposed to be resting my mind, but I did wonder if, with all our innocent apparatus lying about, we looked like some kind of S&M cultists.
But the truth is, our yoga sessions are fun, good exercise and very, very soothing for both body and soul. Which is a good thing. Because the bathtub is still a construction site. And we’ve spent weeks trying to select tile. Hmmmm, now we’ve got a bad case of selectile dysfunction (sorry).
Bidding a fond farewell to tiling, we’re off to yoga class to cleanse our minds of home improvement. I just love when Susan ends her class with the soothing mantra “Be in the moment, Go in peace, Take it with you.”
I usually take it with me right to half price fajita night and there’s a whole week for Beano before the next class. Between the calm of yoga and our plumbers’ prophecy of wine, women and song, I can feel myself healing already. Be in the moment, you-all.
July 2001
OH, BUT WE ARE IN KANSAS, TOTO
It didn’t take the June 20 Delaware Coast Press headline, “Gay Households Increase in Delaware” to tell us anything we didn’t already know. Just check out Lowe’s Hardware on Saturday morning, with pairs of boys buying vertical blinds and lesbians in line for potting soil, and you have a great snapshot of the recent census.
But, if your taste runs to statistics instead of anecdotal evidence, the recently released 2000 census figures contain lots of goodies.
According to the government, since 1990, the number of Delaware households with same-sex couples increased by more than 700 percent to 1,868 households. And of course, that’s only those gay couples who felt comfortable sharing their marital status with Uncle Sam. Heaven knows how many others there actually are. Look for the rainbow stickers on cars parked at Giant and Food Lion and you’ll get a pretty astounding idea. I bet there are 1,800 couples just in our own county.
And while Delaware and Vermont were the first states to have their same-sex stats released, the national numbers seem to be bearing out our Delaware trend.
In fact, a Washington Post article last week noted that not only were the numbers up for same-sex households, but the geographic breadth was startling. “They appear in all 105 counties in Kansas,” said the Post. Now I don’t think it’s unusual to find queer households in every Kansas County; what I find unusual is that people are now willing to go on record about it. It’s great. The catch phrase “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore” may not have the same connotation from now on.
Of course, another thing that the statisticians trumpeted is that gay male couples are more concentrated in cities, while women are putting down their roots in the suburbs. It took a team of census-takers to figure this out? Stereotypically speaking, gals of the lesbian persuasion love spreading mulch and guys want to decorate that urban penthouse. Who didn’t know this? Well, it’s nice having our lives validated by the numbers, anyway.
Although, since the census was only counting “unmarried partners,” all of our single team members are still invisible as far as government figures go. If tabulators stood in the middle of Baltimore Avenue last week their abacuses would have been spinning.
As I read all about the census results, I loved some of the backpedaling done by the statisticians. One Associated Press article said, “Census specialists caution against drawing sweeping conclusions from the data released. For example, some people who consider themselves unmarried partners may in fact be elderly relatives living together, or two men or two women sharing a residence out of convenience.”
Yeah, right. That kind of rhetoric may have worked in Boston in 1912, but these days, I’m pretty sure that people who checked “unmarried partners” knew exactly what they were doing. Other choices on the census form were “housemate,” “boarder,” and “other non-relative.” Choosing “unmarried partner” was deliberate.
Like the gay activists and demographers that have been weighing in on the results, I don’t think there are actually any more of us than there were before. I think we’re just getting awfully tired of being invisible.
Sociology Professor Dwight Fee, from Middlebury College in Vermont, is quoted in Time Magazine saying “Gay life is simply more visible in the culture now. Comedian Chris Rock is out there saying ‘Everybody has a gay cousin.’” And Will & Grace on prime time TV comes to Kansas as well as New York.
Which is not to say that there’s less homophobia and danger in lots of places. It’s just that gay people are starting to realize that being out is the only thing that’s going to show how many of us there are—and how little straight folks have to fear. Out and Proud is not just a banner on a Pride float, it’s a lifestyle that works.
Of course, that’s easy to say in Rehoboth. It’s tough to try it in, say, Lewiston, Idaho. But news on that front is improving, too. Upon returning from a family visit to that part of the world, one young man reported that he heard not a single “fag” joke, and his relatives, seeing him enjoying his toddling nephews, suggested, “You could always adopt.” Pretty cool.
Actually, last weekend I was in upstate New York, feeling pretty invisible myself. Visiting Seneca Lake, home of those fabulous suffragettes (almost ALL of whom were happily ensconced in same-sex couplehood—and don’t let any marriages of convenience stories fool you), I was surprised to see so few of us.
At our hotel, there were no other beans to be found (You know, lez beans, like human beans). On the way home on the New York Thruway, a car passed and folks waved. I couldn’t figure out what for, until I saw their rainbow sticker. Heck, if we waved at every car with a rainbow sticker in Rehoboth, we’d have no time to drive.
So living here in a gay-friendly ghetto is probably lots different from being in the hinterlands. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have work to do here, either.
And while all the national stats aren’t released yet, it’s a good guess that the numbers of same-sex unmarried partners nationwide is going to be a hard number to ignore. The census bureau estimated in 1998 that there were approximately 1,674,000 same sex couples in the United States. If the new numbers increase the same eightfold over 1990 numbers, and reflect only those who are willing to go on record, can you imagine how many of us there really are? That, ladies and gentlemen, is clout.
So let’s start here at home. How many times am I going to have to fill out paperwork at a doctor’s or dentist’s office that gives me the choice of “Married, Single or Divorced?”
I’ve said it before. I can honestly check all three. I consider myself married, the government considers me single, and then there was that divorce from the accordion player. So who am I, if not “partnered” with Bonnie????
We have to start demanding a “partnered” category so we can stop being the invisible patients. Certainly, with the census backing up our numbers, we can ask our local hospital and doctor’s offices to allow for the diversity within their practices.
Okay, that’s my first salvo in the visibility war. In the meantime, settle down and be counted.
July 2001
COMING OUT OF THE WALK-IN CLOSET
Apparently, Rehoboth Beach used to have rustic cottages you could tour. Real summer places, with skimpy outdoor shower faucets, plank floors caked with sand, and furniture capable of surviving wet, mildewy towels. My family called them bungalows.
Well, for over 50 years, the Rehoboth Art League has been hosting its wonderful Cottage Tour and, just like everything else in life, evolution has had its impact. These days it’s definitely not your grandmother’s summer cottage tour.
You can debate whether change is good or bad all you want, but nowadays the Art League’s Cottage Tour is part decorator showcase, part art appreciation and part eat-your-heart-out-that-you-didn’t-buy-property-in-Rehoboth-when-it-was-affordable day.
At the League’s mos
t recent Cottage Tour the throngs tromping through the residences were as entertaining as the tour itself. While it’s very generous of the hosts to open their homes for the benefit of charity, I wonder if they had any idea of the kind of scrutiny they’d face. To the Art League’s credit, there were little signs everywhere reminding people not to touch things since they were the host’s personal belongings.
But let’s face it, the cottage tour is a nosy person’s dream come true. You get to check out the decor and personal effects of people you don’t even know. Or some you do know. What better fun than to peer into other people’s living rooms, dens, bedrooms, and closets.
And speaking of closets, some of the cottage owners, by letting the troops in for the tour, made a point of coming out of them. I loved the house with the framed National Coming Out Day poster in a guest room and copies of Letters casually displayed in visible places.
More fun still, in one living room there was a dramatic portrait of the homeowners. Two grey-haired ladies entered behind me. “Look at the lovely piano, and that wonderful paint…my word, that’s two men!”
“Oh, dear.”
Enraptured, they stared, inert, at the painting until I thought their little straw handbags, not to mention their teeth, would clatter to the floor. It begs the question of exactly where in Rehoboth they’ve been.
As the ladies toddled off, their little white stack heels clacking on the hardwood, they made a point of looking at all the personal photos in the rooms—confirming what they saw in oil downstairs. The pair seemed to suffer no ill effects from the initial shock, and I actually think they enjoyed a sort of naughty pleasure as they looked around.
