She Blogs

Straight Americans need... an education of the heart and soul.  They must understand - to begin with - how it can feel to spend years denying your own deepest truths, to sit silently through classes, meals, and church services while people you love toss off remarks that brutalize your soul.  ~Bruce Bawer

My friend Gina over on Dogma advised me to blame Typepad for the fact that I haven't blogged in a week and a half, but alas, I didn't even realize Typepad had gone down for a few days.

It's not that I had nothing to say. It's not even that I've been Christmas shopping... excuse me, HOLIDAY shopping, I forgot that as a liberal I can't use the word "Christmas."  I suppose most of the reasons I haven't been blogging are way too journally to go into here.

But I will mention that, thanks to a free one-month trial of Netflix, I recently saw the five-year-old made-for-cable-TV series "Queer as Folk" for the first time. I was talking about it to my friend Travis, getting a little worked up over something in the first episode I saw, and after  listening for a while he gently said, "You do realize this is a five year old conversation, don't you?" I guess the entire gay universe and much of the straight universe already had the debate over that particular controversial element of the series while I was stuck out here in the country without premium cable channels and totally cut off from most of the major cultural debates of the era.

So, this is not exactly news from the cutting edge, but last night I watched the final episode of the first season of the show, in which Brian, the narcissistic, rejecting older boyfriend of 18-year-old high school senior Justin, shows up at his prom and dances just once with him, to the strains of "Save the Last Dance for Me." There is no question this scene should have been embarrassing as hell. Anything that happens at a prom is almost guaranteed to be embarrassing, after all, and the picked-upon (but cute) blond gay teen dancing with his boyfriend doubly so. But somehow, it wasn't. It was, frankly, the sweetest, most romantic piece of television I've ever watched. I actually got tears in my eyes.

And then immediately afterward, in the parking lot, Justin gets his head bashed in with a baseball bat by one of his classmates.

So, there I was, sitting in the dark caught on the edge between the dance and the baseball bat to the head. I was thinking about a time I was standing in line at an ATM in San Francisco, near Kaiser Medical Center, with my friend Yvette, who had spiky hair and a leather jacket. A guy walked up who was of the opinion that lesbians shouldn't be allowed to access their bank accounts in public places, and smashed my head into the windshield of a parked car while kicking Yvette in the ribs and calling us dykes. It wasn't the first time something like that happened, starting with the word "Fag" being spray painted on my locker door at my all-girl's Catholic high school (I'm guessing there was a bit of an illiteracy problem there, but whatever), to various kicks, shoves, pinches, punches, broken car windows, slashed tires, and hateful words of varying degrees of threat being showered on me from the day I entered high school until I was in my 30s.

So, is this politics or is this journaling? I ask because as long as I'm talking about marriage equality or some other tangible, legal aspect of being gay in America, it's clearly politics. But I don't know what it is, when you're forty-six years old watching a trashy television show and start to cry because a boy is dancing with his boyfriend at his prom, and then someone tries to kill him for it, and then you remember what it feels like to have your head slammed into a windshield by a guy calling you a dyke. I just know if  politics can't encompass that particular kind of broken heart, then politics is crap.

Comments

[Gina]

So ... we can expect you to comment on "The L Word" series in 2011? (Cute babes ... Jennifer Beal (think "Flashdance"), for one.)

Darlin', you need TiVo and a satellite dish. You'll watch much less TV, but enjoy it far more.

[Leigh-Ann]

Heh... I was beaten to a comment about "The L Word" ;-)

Oddly enough, right before I started doing my daily blog surfing, I was reading an article in Google news about the first gay weddings in Northern Ireland. There were protesters telling the members of the wedding parties that they were "an abomination". Certainly words are less damaging in most ways than baseball bats, but 5 years later, it shows that while laws are changing, a lot of attitudes aren't.

[Kim]

{{{{{Christie}}}}}

[KT]

LOL, Gina ... let's not rush her ;) And it still IS a good show, trashy or not!

[Sandy]

Every time two gay men go to a prom, or two women share a romantic kiss on the street, they are experiencing something that straight people don't (and many don't understand). Each act of love takes extreme bravery and risk. To even "look like" dykes can draw anger and violence. We live a bittersweet truth. Thanks for reminding me of that.
P.S. My friends tell me I need to give it more time, but I think I am the only lesbian who really didn't enjoy the 3 early episodes of The L Word that I watched. The women were beautiful, yes, but I found I didn't really connect with them... or their lives.

[Leigh-Ann]

Sandy, if it helps, my partner and I stopped watching "The L Word" early in season 2. We didn't really identify with any of the characters once the writers broke Bette and Tina up. My partner and I just live a normal, everyday life, and "The L Word" just didn't represent that to us after a while. That being said, our straight hairstylist loves the show... I guess drama is more fun if you're not trying to see yourself reflected in it.