Courting Equality and Barbara Grier

            Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender equality/liberation should be a done deal in 2011.  But apparently not, if a major political party thinks that its nominee for President of the US must be opposed to such progress as marriage equality or women’s rights to control their own reproduction.

The two topics above are converging in my head just now because Pat Gozemba just sent me a copy of the marvelous documentary history of the struggle for marriage equality in Massachusetts that she wrote with her partner Karen Kahn, and Barbara Grier died this week.

            Courting Equality: A Documentary History of America's First Legal Same-Sex Marriages (Beacon Press, 2007) would make an excellent holiday gift for every politically progressive home on your list.  The photographs by Marilyn Humphries made me weep even before I read the fast-moving text.  Descriptions of legal struggles, no matter how important the issues, usually make me yawn.  But Pat and Karen have made the tale of winning equality read like a thriller.  I couldn’t put it down.

The magic in the fast-paced narrative and heart-melting pictures comes from the stories of real people. The book chronicles the lives of seven couples, plaintiffs in the suit for equality, and their children. Mary Bonauto, the winning lawyer, is the brains and face of the final push, but the whole lesbian/gay community and maybe the whole Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the collective Hero. 

Despite outspending by national deep pockets of right-wing fundamentalists and the forever backward Catholic Church and the lies they tell about gay people, Justice prevailed.  Everyone wins when everyone has equal rights.  

Second, Barbara Grier’s passing this week makes us pause to commemorate a woman who spent her life ferociously focused on promoting lesbian visibility and lesbian literature, finding lost writers of an earlier era and searching out new lesbian writers.  Just put her name in your search engine and up will come dozens of obits across the country. 

I admire her passion for excavating lesbian literature and acknowledge that Lesbian Nuns wouldn’t exist if she hadn’t pushed us to write it. But my gratitude is still wrapped in a bit of outrage for the ways she sold the book.  However, we must not let the controversy about those sales swamp out the historic significance of the book for readers just coming out in 1985 or its lasting impact as a watershed moment in lesbian and feminist publishing. 

My personal story in progress tentatively titled Gathering Sisters: My Lesbian Nuns Story  will tell what I remember.  Perhaps even more important for clarifying the book’s lasting meaning for the scholarly world will be the history of its publication currently in progress by Joanne Passett, historian and award-winning writer/scholar, tentatively titled Lesbian Nuns: Revered and Reviled. 

Report from Duke Lung Transplant Center

Doris and I drove to Durham, NC, last Saturday and Sunday (11/5-6) for a second battery of tests all day Monday.   Duke pulmonologist Dr. Alice Gray believes that my lungs have “progressed” more rapidly than anticipated in the past three months.  The full team will decide next Tuesday, but they may ask me to return in 3-4 weeks for more testing.  I hope they decide I can wait until 2012.

            When I return they will probably decide when we need to move to Durham.  Ideally they want you doing their exercises at the Duke Center for Living five days a week four hours a day for six weeks before surgery.  They want me to be in top physical shape in every way before they do surgery.  When they think I’m ready for transplant, I’ll be “listed” and given a beeper.  When my new lung is ready, I must be on the operating table in two hours.  Lungs are the most fragile organs.  Size and blood type must be compatible. 

            I know that my lungs are deteriorating because I need more oxygen for everything.  I can walk only a short distance (needing 4-6 liters of continuous flow oxygen per minute).  Standing up is an aerobic exercise for me.  Doris is helping me find energy conserving aids in the apt.  I have a junior chair in the kitchen and a bath chair in shower.  I do as little as possible in both places.

            I may be unusually debilitated at the moment and hope to regain some energy.  I had to take antibiotics for ten days, which left me constantly nauseated and exhausted.  The first day off antibiotics we got on the road to NC.

            I fetched Doris from the airport on Thursday, Nov. 3.  We were both exhausted and happy to just Be Together in what she calls my “tree house.”  She loves the pond, fountains, ducks, herons, and especially the turtles that swim right up under my balcony.  We ordered Chinese delivery, which may become my mainstay. 

            On Friday evening the DeVore’s whirled in with their own Chinese take-away and then out in a couple of hours.  They regaled us with pictures and stories.  Dave and Cheyenne played Chinese Checkers, pointedly not inviting me to join them because I always win.  “Can’t you let Cheyenne win?” asks Doris.  No, when she beats me she will have learned how.

            By the time Doris and I headed northward on Saturday, it was already after noon, but we made it to the Best Western in Florence, SC, an hour after dark. On Sunday I felt strong enough to push my oxygen a short way on my rollator into Trader Joe’s in Raleigh with frequent pauses to sit down.  We arrived at the Durham La Quinta about 2:30.  After lunch at Red Lobster next door, we did a practice run to Duke Medical so that we could find our way in the morning. 

            Monday started with 8 am lab tests and ran non-stop all day.  We stole half an hour for bfst/lunch by convincing the med psych evaluator rosy-cheeked scholar Patrick Smith, PhD, that he could certify us sane and stable in half an hour—not the full hour allotted.  Thus we could grab a sandwich at Subway. 

            Happily we arrived at my tree house in daylight on Wed.  Coughing up gobs of mucus had frightened and exhausted me.  I called my FL pulmonologist’s office for advice on the road.  I was told to come in on Friday afternoon. 

Yesterday I did succeed in pushing myself through most of my exercise routine— 15 minutes on the treadmill but only at 1.4 mph on 6 L oxygen and 10 minutes on recumbent bike with no resistance.  After that I met with the pulmonary support group for the first time, but it wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped.  Most had been coping with COPD for years, and none required the amount of oxygen I do.  The nurse who led the group talked about stress over holidays.  Most of the old breathers claimed they’d given up stress years ago.

While I was at WP Hospital, Doris and Lisa went to IKEA.  I knew they were both having a good time stimulating the Swedish economy.  After meeting up with Doris, we spent three hours at the pulmonologist’s office where I was told to take Zyrtec and Mucinex and come back in four weeks. 

It’s a long strange trip ahead.  After Doris leaves early Tuesday, I’ll get back to writing.  I have all the LN files here now.  I hope I can draft my Florida chapters in the next two months before we have to pull up stakes again and head to NC.

Rollins Women at the Feminist Forum

Feminist Forum at Rollins College, October 2011

Gloria Steinem drew an overflow crowd to the Rollins gym this past weekend for a surprisingly intimate yet rousing retrospective on the women’s movement—past, present and future.  Three Rollins presidents and many of my former colleagues showed up. 

            In the posed picture of Rollins women, I’m amazed to find myself between Past President Rita Bornstein and Gloria Steinem with Lynda Glennon and Twila Papay, old friends and colleagues.

Veteran Feminists of America, a group of women involved in NOW and other feminist political groups in the sixties and seventies, sponsored the conference to celebrate the 45^th anniversary of NOW. 

Wendy Brandon enlisted students from her feminist theory class to interview twelve of the VFAs for an oral history project and asked me to moderate the final session on the Legacy of Feminist Activism.  What fun!  Two other sessions examined history and coalition-building. 

In the picture below, you have left to right: Amy Hackett, student Jamie Pennington, RK, women’s studies director Rhonda Ovist, Sally Lunt, Sheila Tobias, students Sarah Spurling and Norma Mangual Price, and Jacqui Ceballos. 

Lisa joined me for all Saturday events and pushed me from place ot place in my rollator when I was too breathless to walk.   I couldn’t have done it without her.  She enjoyed seeing her old profs.

I was thrilled to see so many of my old colleagues who had helped me launch women’s studies at Rollins three decades ago.  They said I sounded the same as ever—like the good old days when I was leading the charge.  It felt fantastic to be back in the saddle again.  Again in 2011 at Rollins we were riding a tidal wave of energy and enthusiasm into the future.  Rollins women’s studies gave me a certificate for “pioneering feminist leadership.”  Wowza!

Let’s hope this return to Rollins, if only for a weekend, creates new connections and jolts me into writing about those years (roughly 1979 to 92—my forties in the eighties) when we (all my women’s communities) forged onward through backlash.  My blocked creativity now for that period is probably rooted in my own conscious memories of pain, strife, frustration, and grief that must be faced if I write the truth.  Lesbian Nuns came out in 1985, and my mother died at the end of the year.  I burned out.  And I found Sisters Everywhere.  Truly “It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times.”

Doris arrives tomorrow for twelve days.  On Saturday we drive to Durham, NC, where I have another evaluation scheduled next week at Duke Lung Transplant Center.  We’ll be back here by the end of the week, but I may be away from email for a while.

Feminist Forum on Leaving a Legacy