Fried & Convicted, page 15
We love you! But that certainly doesn’t mean we’re anywhere near ready to cede our barstools, volunteer badges, or tix to events big and small. We’re still here, still queer, and pretty damn used to it. And the more things change, the more they stay the same. I love it.
June 2016
BEAUTY SECRETS FROM “THE FINGERNAIL FILES”
As I sit writing this, it’s United Nations World Happiness Day. Clearly those who suggested the holiday have not been watching the U.S. presidential primary coverage. Although it does square with the news that the U.S. ranks 13th in world happiness, whereas Denmark is first. Obviously, Shakespeare aside, nothing is rotten in Denmark.
As for me, this past week I decided to de-stress myself from current events and advance the U.S. happiness scale by taking some much needed “me” time.
Following a hair appointment to color and highlight my prematurely gray hair (are my pants on fire?), I figured a massage would further relax me.
“Hello, before I usher you into our waiting lounge, do you need to use the restroom?”
“Nope.”
So then the sadist receptionist brings me into a darkened room with a loudly tinkling water feature. “Um, about that bathroom . . .”
Returning, I saw a table with jars of aromatherapy sprigs. I sniffed one titled “Contentment” and it smelled like Pennzoil. Going in for a sniff of “Relaxation,” I leapt back, face and nose contorted by the olfactory assault. Jeesh, if that was relaxation how does “Hassle” smell?
Then a staffer asked me to turn off my cell phone.
“And you want me to relax????”
I lay on the table in the dimly lit room, listening to melody-free music, trying to unclench my body. It was tough not to recall medical exams. Or the first massage I’d ever had—where an 80-year-old Nordic masseuse poured so much oil on me I expected her to add tomatoes and balsamic vinegar.
“Hello,” said the seemingly teenage masseuse. As she worked on me, I tried to engage her in conversation, but was met with one-word answers. “Jersey,” “Cool,” “Adele.” The single multi-syllable response was to my question, “How long have you been doing this?” with the answer being “Fifteen minutes.” Last comic kneading.
Admittedly very relaxed, I rose cautiously from the table, dressed slowly and exited in a leisurely manner. I was afraid to step out into reality and traffic too fast lest I get the bends. Luckily there was a nail salon next door so I could continue the pamperfest.
My nail polish history is an American horror story. While an infrequent activity, I would occasionally head to the salon. Despite foraging for credit card and keys pre-manicure so as not to use my hands afterwards, without fail, within minutes I looked like somebody who’d clawed their way out of a building collapse. Ten bucks down the crapper.
But this time, I learned something astonishing. The technician told me about gel polish, guaranteed to dry instantly, be strong as an ox and endure several weeks without chipping. And the cost was only twenty dollars more than regular polish. Perfect!
I chose an uncharacteristic Reese Witherspoon pink for my nails and let the techie have at it. It was a simple procedure, prepaid so as not to disturb the polish when I left.
So far, so good. But as I stepped out into the parking lot, my phone rang. Physiologically unable to ignore a ringing phone, I rooted around in my pocket for the device, took the call and amazingly did not screw up a single fingernail. This was incredible. They stayed perfect. Magic gel! I was sold. My world happiness score jumped several notches.
It was not until I showed off my nails to a woman entering the salon that I learned the truth. Hearing it was my first gel polish experience, she asked if the technician mentioned that you can’t remove the gel polish by yourself. Excuse me? You have to come back? That’s right, after the fact, I learned that cotton balls and polish remover are useless, as my digits were now encased in rock-solid gel to be removed only by a professional—the ultimate case of “don’t try this at home.”
That’s when I started to suspect that this fingernail gel coat was the exact same substance used to paint fiberglass boat hulls. I could have smashed a bottle of champagne on my thumb and it would still be in the pink. I’d have to go to a marine detailer to get this gunk off.
When I got home and googled gel nail polish, I became alarmed. Blog after blog reported the sordid dangers of gel nails. How “a long chain of molecules in the gel polishes gives them strength, hardened by exposure to ultraviolet light.”
Ah yes, now I recall having my hands placed under a glowing purple haze. Was the UV curing step a road to “cumulative DNA damage, premature skin aging and even cancer?” Oh boy.
Article after article advised applying SPF 50 sunscreen before a manicure or wearing protective gloves with the fingertips cut off. Somehow I cannot see me wearing weight-lifting gloves into the salon. But I certainly didn’t want premature age spots to go with my prematurely gray hair.
Other articles cautioned leaving nails unpolished (Oh no! Not that!) for at least two weeks between gel coats to assess nail condition and prevent infections. Then there’s the danger of peeling and lifting, where water can seep into the nail, leading to thinning of the nail plate and a dreaded fungus. Not one to encourage a fungus among us (sorry), this all seemed very complicated to me.
With all the other things I’ve got to worry about, I couldn’t see myself obsessing over abscesses in my nail beds. These babies looked great.
My shiny nails glowed pretty in pink as I sat before the TV to catch up on the news. Oy, there was violence on the campaign trail! Lead in the water! Deadly Zika virus! Children with guns!
No wonder America is unlucky number thirteen in world happiness. Clenched up, stressed to the max, I sat watching the babbling talking heads on TV, my nails digging into my thighs.
My relaxation was long gone, but at least my gel coat was here to stay.
June 2016
PASSING THE PRIDE ALONG
It’s Pride season, although I am proud to live in a place where we celebrate all year long. But recently there’s been a lot of talk about our gay culture and whether we might lose it by gaining our rights and disappearing into the swiftly moving mainstream.
Judy Garland, Walt Whitman, Billie Jean King, Rubyfruit Jungle, drag kings, Harvey Milk, P-town. Our history, our heroes, our catch phrases, our culture. We have a long past featuring a common sensibility born from our outlaw days as a secret society.
We managed to survive and even thrive while much of society despised us. We have our jokes, etiquette, magazines, and buzzwords. But I worry. How does this culture survive and get handed down?
In most cultures, passing along the history and sensibility is the job of the parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. My Jewish family taught me my culture. From as far back as I can remember there was chopped liver, matzo ball soup, and hand-wringing guilt; Grandma Rose taught me to make blintzes, Uncle Abe couldn’t stop telling Henny Youngman jokes, and of course we learned our social history (“Never again!”)
By the time I was ten, I was thoroughly steeped in our Jewish ethos. It was our culture to learn and to savor, handed down at the dinner table.
Which begs the question How the heck are we going to make sure our gay culture gets passed down through generations if our alphabet generations do not, for the most part, come from LGBT parents?
Wake up, people, it’s our job! Yes, each of us. We’ve each got to be a storehouse, a library, and an oral history of LGBT knowledge, trivia, and even jokes.
How many lesbians does it take to change a lightbulb?
Six. One to change the bulb and five more to sit around and process. (Rim shot sound effect.)
We need to go back and embrace our early years. Let’s hear it for The Mattachine Society, Harry Hay, and Leonard Matlovich. Don’t know about them? Find out! Let’s talk about lesbian separatists, like the Gutter Dykes in Berkeley, and Radicalesbians in Manhattan. And tales of U.S. properties owned by women where only women were allowed. They would even take m-e-n, out of it completely, spelling it wimmin or womyn.
My favorites were The Van Dykes, a roving band of van-driving vegans who shaved their heads, refused to speak to men, and traveled the highways stopping only on “Women’s Land.”
In the ’80s we had the Pink Panthers protecting neighborhoods from anti-gay violence, gay credit unions, stores, publishing houses, and late great gay bookstores. The first organized lesbian group, the Daughters of Bilitis, had a name that sounded like a disease, but it was powerful. Pass it on!
We must broadcast the work of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the enormity of the AIDS quilt, the pioneers like Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny who picketed the White House in the ’60s for gay rights, the fall of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and the entire equality playbook that has brought us to this Pride season. This is culture we need to protect, celebrate, and hand down to our youngsters.
Do we institute “Take a Baby Dyke to Lunch Week”? Well, maybe. Not only can we pass along what we know to those younger than we are, but we can socialize with our elders and solicit their stories before they are lost to time.
I have been lucky, as a writer, to interview so many people over the years and hear about their remarkable lives. I was astounded in speaking with one late gay elder, a retired bartender at a long-gone gay bar. I was shocked and saddened when I heard his tale of being arrested, jailed, and permanently stripped of his teaching license because he was caught in a gay relationship.
These things mostly didn’t happen anymore in my generation (fired, yes; jail, not so much), but they happened frequently and tragically to our previous generations. We need to know the stories and pass them along.
With not as many everyday softball leagues as there used to be, we’re in danger of forgetting that softball was one of the premier ways lesbians used to meet. Leagues were ubiquitous and as important to our tribe as gay bars. Not so much today.
Whether we have been in touch with our families of origin or not, most of us have built marvelous families of affinity with whom we share holidays, birthdays and daily living. Let’s widen the circle to include Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and whatever generations we do not represent. We can spread the word and preserve our culture.
And we shouldn’t leave out the fun stuff, either.
How many lesbians does it take to change a light bulb?
Six. One to change the bulb and five more to organize the potluck.
We need to make sure tales of the 1979 march, TV’s Ellen coming out, films like Desert Hearts, and our fabled Women’s Music live on. Our gay pioneers meant it’s possible for Ricky Martin, the Indigo Girls, and Sam Smith to be out and proud now. So go join a P-Flag chapter. Get involved. Encourage multi-generational get-togethers to share and perpetuate our culture. Be the voice to share our antiquity.
After all, who, if not us, will keep the memory of the mullet haircut alive. It’s part of our culture. Embrace it. And be glad it’s gone.
June 2016
SAFETY IN NUMBERS
Pride month has always been a time to celebrate. And after the events of June 12 in Orlando, when a gay safe haven was violated, we must mourn, support our community, and then move on. Or else the haters win. And we cannot let them win. Not the anti-gay haters or the anti-American haters. We cannot let them win.
Yes, I’m sad and angry. No, I am not callous and wishing we could just move on. Yes, I could easily stay depressed over the loss of those precious lives and be scared for myself, my community, my gay life. But I won’t.
There are plenty of voices raised in sorrow, anger and not a little fear for our safety. Plenty raised in solidarity, prayer, and mourning. Not me. I’ll use this ink, this magazine page I am generously given to ask you to join me in trying to effect change.
What needs to be changed? First, LGBT visibility. And it translates to safety. Come out, come out, whoever you are. Everybody needs to come out, again and again. The more people see us and know us, the safer we will be. Legislation alone, while critically important, cannot protect LGBT people.
A straight friend once said, “You have your rights now, it’s great, right? What else do you need?”
We need respect. Clearly we are still not safe from hatred fomented from some pulpits and wedge issue- seeking politicians. Clearly respect and a safe environment cannot be legislated. So all of us, gay and our allies alike, must bravely come out to everyone we encounter in support of respect for LGBT Americans.
We must speak up, outing ourselves, introducing spouses, and nonchalantly educating society. It will make us safer.
Second, we must make guns safer. Ha! You laugh! It’s a non-starter! At the moment, it is. As President Obama just said, we’ve made cars safer, saving countless lives with safety improvements. And nobody is yelling “They’re going to take away our cars!” We’re allowed to have conversations about auto safety. So we have, and cars are safer.
Now we must fight the NRA and the right-wing political machine for conversations about gun safety. We must demand these conversations. If we could talk about it, we’d encourage fingerprint ID technology on guns. It would prevent gun owners from having their own weapons yanked out of their hands and used to kill them; toddlers finding a gun and killing a sibling; criminals stealing guns and using them to kill. The tech is on our iPhones; why not our guns?
If we could talk about it, we’d discuss background checks so suspected terrorists on the no-fly list couldn’t buy guns. The hypocrisy is stunning. You cannot claim to hate potential terrorists while telling them to buy all the guns they want. Demand to talk about this!
Shout it out: Assault weapons are only for killing humans—and a lot of them at a time. What place does this have off the battlefield? Ban them again. We must have this conversation.
By the way, the government is not coming for your guns. That battle cry is a despicable right-wing red herring. Cowboys, businesspeople, farmers, hunters and even a raging liberal like me who likes sport shooting, should be allowed to keep our guns. But demand a conversation about safety!
Third, make sure we do not let the dividers and haters encourage us to do their work for them. We cannot scapegoat the entire Muslim-American community, or even immigrating refugees, for the heinous deeds of some hate-filled, disturbed individuals.
The more we broad-brush the Muslim community with the taint of the few, and the more we marginalize members of an entire religion, the more incentive there is for young, disaffected persons to seek misguided fame.
We must not hate. There must be room for all. It’s safer that way.
How do we do it? The coming out portion is direct, although not always easy. Like Nike says, just do it. Be fearless, be friendly, but be out. When people get to know us personally, we are no longer just “one of them.” Do it. Eventually it will even be fun.
The gun safety conversations? DEMAND them . . . sign a petition, demand it of your legislators, write a letter to the editor, talk on social media, join the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (bradycampaign.com), speak out!
And finally, make “Room for All” your credo. Hopefully, we can reach out to our Muslim neighbors, work to be inclusive, learn about their community, and respect them as we too wish to be respected. Will we achieve total success? Of course not. Will this stop all discrimination against the LGBT and Muslim communities? No way. Will this curb all gun violence? I’m not that naïve.
But if we all work together, we can have the conversations that lead to real change. If we do our part, we can go back to celebrating Gay Pride Month the way it was meant to be celebrated. Because if the gay community has learned one thing over the years, it’s that silence = death.
June 2016
THE NEW FEAR OF FLYING
I just read a report that one of the major airlines has decided that culinary deprivation is not friendly customer service. They will be providing passengers with snacks again. Like that would help.
For a person raised in the era when you could get to the airport forty-five minutes before your flight, check two heavy bags for free, and carry on as many ounces of liquid refreshment and/or moisturizing cream as you wanted, peanuts are not going to cut it.
We used to fly standby, be allowed to pack scissors, have family walk us to the gate, enjoy an onboard meal, fly in relative comfort, and have loved ones greet us the moment we landed. Those were the good old days.
Okay, I do not miss the sexism of the whole stewardess thing, and I love that flight attendants come in all manner of age, gender, race, and sexual orientations. As wonderful as that evolution is, it doesn’t make up for the tragic deterioration of modern air travel.
Not only can I now spend consecutive days in the same TSA line, enjoying a quarter of my trip at an airport, but I have to wear flip-flops to do it. That’s because sneakers are too complex to put back on while hopping on one foot and grabbing my stuff off the moving conveyor belt. And God forbid I leave my bag unattended for a minute. I live in fear of airport personnel detonating my pajamas.
Frankly, I didn’t miss snacks and wouldn’t even miss beverages. Every time I balance a cocktail on my flimsy tray table the guy in front of me leans his seat back and shoots two ounces of booze up my nose—not the kind of vodka stinger I prefer.
I should decline drinks anyway, since it’s hell to battle my way out of the middle seat, squeeze up the incredible shrinking aisle, and pray the restroom is available. My bladder isn’t what it used to be. Remember when we’d laugh at the closed door and hope somebody was joining the mile high club? Now I’m terrified to laugh at all.
