{Originally Posted on Clotted Cognition}
When my mother moved back to Dallas in 1989 she bought this town home. It’s a gorgeous place, one that almost takes your breath away when you walk in. The street was one that had been taken over by architecturally designed town homes that were mostly higher end and populated by people without children. In general, the people in those town homes were older, retired, or better off young professionals. It was close-ish to the predominantly gay area in Dallas, so there were several gay couples as well. The street was named Travis Street and it was also the street on which my first home stood, 40 years ago last month.

We used to see one of those gay couples out walking every day. Well, one would walk and push the other in a wheelchair. Their love and devotion to each other was clear and I remember thinking that I hoped I would find that sort of devotion someday, too. Unless you’ve experienced what it’s like to take care of a once healthy partner, I don’t think the sacrifice is truly imaginable. This couple continued to take their walks, to slowly make their way down the street to get a glimpse of the life outside, traveling the street as any couple would who had been together for a long time.

And then, the man in the wheelchair died. This was sad enough and devastating, I am sure, for his partner. But the sadness was not to end to there, nor was the devastation going to be small. Instead of being allowed to grieve in his own home, surrounded by his own memories of times had in loving company, the family of the man who died, the man who owned the home and its contents in legal name only, unceremoniously kicked the grieved partner out onto the street. How could they do such a thing? Easy: with all legal recourse. They didn’t care that the man they were throwing out onto the street has cared for their relative when they were nowhere to be seen; he had assuredly cleaned up after the inevitable failures of the man’s body and had still found a way to push him down the street every single day. They didn’t care that the man they were throwing out had loved their relative as they clearly never had, nor did they care that this man was a human being.

{Originally published on Lesbian Dad}

I wake up before 6:00am, with the alarm. Dress fast, leave the house before the kids come to bed. I could count on two hands, maybe one, the number of times I’ve done that before.

Daylight savings time at least enables me to pull away from the house in the rosy-fingered dawn, and not the pitch-darkness.

I nab one of the last parking spots at the First Congregational Church, a good thing, since I don’t know where I’ll be going during the day, and there is precious little easy parking in town. Coffee and donuts arrayed on a table outside the church. A long line stretches outside for people who hadn’t attended the weekend Election Day GOTV trainings there. The rest of us go right up to the door, sign in. Name, cell phone number (to be contacted while out in the field, redeployed, what have you). Where would all this work be without the cell phone, one wants to know.

Folks of all sorts there. Young, old, men, women. All races, but mostly white. But this is Berkeley. I wonder what the other “hubs” look like. Across the room I see a man I met eighteen years ago at an LGBT youth activists’ training conference. Two thoughts: one, he’s aged well. Same mustache, even. Two: thank god he made it through the epidemic.

I’m sent off with two fresh-faced young men to a Presbyterian Church in a professorial neighborhood. It’s none of my business, but I think both of them are heterosexuals. It dawns on me: this is just a straight-up civil rights issue to the young people. Each of us has a grocery bag containing a sign, a stack of “palm cards” with No on 8 essentials on it to distribute (Opposed by: Barack Obama, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dianne Feinstein, and on down). Included is a small spool of stickers, should anyone want any.

I position myself exactly where the poll captain directs me, and over the course of several hours distribute a handful of cards. It’s quiet at my poll, and I’m grateful. Before 10:00am it’s clear that this battle knocked the wind out of me long before election day. I am there to help – really, have to be — but I have no spirit with which to do it. Many people smile on their way in. As many studiously avoid eye contact. But it feels like we’re tired of it all. Maybe I’m projecting.

One white-bearded man sporting a hippie-batik kufi cap chats with me at length…

Originally published on Deb on the Rocks

I have a theory that humans take a fancy to the things that keep them in a perpetual state of foreplay. Not in a perpetual state of pre-orgasm, because as we have established, constantly living on the edge of a volcano could be a bit too much. But foreplay, a continuous state of desire, arousal, exploration and craving, that is the human preference.

Baseball, politics, film, cooking, eating, organizing, Viggo Mortensen,
aquariums, god only know what you are into. I’m betting that if we
could start in the part of your brain where your love of whatever it is
you love resides and follow the sparking and frayed wiring past where
it crosses the blue synapses and the firing yellow connections and that
knot of red wire, we would find a glowing hotspot in your neural
network that’s throbbing and straining to break through a zipper.

That said, I love the roller derby.

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