Tag: memories

National Coming Out Day

National Coming Out Day has been recognized on October 11 since 1988, when it marked the first anniversary of the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. My friend Alan linked to a video of a newscast from that event in 1987, and as I watched it, I found myself thinking, In those days, because of AIDS, coming out, being visible, was a matter of life and death. When I finished watching the video, I realized–coming out is still a matter of life and death.

I’ve been thinking a lot about courage lately. It’s one of those words applied to a wide variety of human experiences: Her courageous battle with cancer… The fireman courageously entered the burning building… They have the courage of their convictions… The courage of our troops fighting in Afghanistan…

Is it an overused word? I don’t know that it is. Because I’ve always believed that many of our biggest words–courage, strength, honor, love, heroism, honesty, compassion–are shown in the smallest acts of our daily lives. For those people who showed up in Washington, D.C., in 1987, courage meant saying, publicly, “I am a lesbian.” It meant contributing a quilt panel with the name of a beloved someone who died of a disease that everyone had kept a secret. Or walking down a street with a sign even if you didn’t feel like it was “your” cause because you believed it was a right cause.

  • Courage is being visible when a lot of people would like for you to remain invisible so they can be comfortable.
  • Courage is knowing that not everyone who is gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered has the supportive environment you might enjoy, so you commend their first step toward visibility, whether it is taken gloriously or hesitantly.
  • Courage is not mocking people because they look or behave or express themselves in ways that aren’t your ways but are authentic to who they are.
  • Courage is understanding that some people are not ready to open that closet door and letting them know that when they are, you will stand with them against whatever comes their way.
  • Courage is using your voice for people whose voices have been silenced by hate, by fear, by death.
  • Courage is understanding that even if you can’t raise your voice loud and proud and publicly, you can say quietly to someone, “I love you for exactly who you are, and I always will.”

Magnetic Poetry 365:270

The old Juicy Fruit wasn’t yellow.

Did anyone else make chains with chewing gum wrappers? When you stretched the chain to its full length, it was supposed to be as tall as the man you’d marry.

Or if you could separate the white backing from the gum’s inner foil wrapping without tearing the foil, it was good luck.

Modern gum packaging makes these things archaic. LIKE ME.

This poem is for Debby, Jackie, and Jackie’s younger sister Sherry. I loved those mornings in that cold car feeling like one of the “big girls.”

Button Sunday


Another button from my days in the bookstore.

Last night I had a very long and complicated dream about working at Borders. Usually when I dream about working at a bookstore, it’s Bookstop, and I generally have those dreams when I’m under a lot of stress.

This time, however, I know the dream is because I’ve been reading articles about the last few days of the final Borders stores. It seems to me both chains followed pretty much the same trajectory. They were begun by people who had a passion for books. The unique approaches each founder bought to the bookselling world resulted in fast and furious success. They expanded to their breaking point, then sold out to a larger corporate entity who wanted to cash in on their success. Regardless of how passionate the chains’ booksellers, customers, and local management were, from the top down the stores were driven by profit without regard to the products and services provided. They lost all the qualities and practices that made them a success to begin with.

And in time, they failed and shuttered their stores.

The cities and towns where they once existed have lost a place to discover new books and rediscover familiar writers, meet authors at book signings, enjoy a community where a cup of coffee can be read over a newspaper or magazine, find knowledgable people who can help answer that plaintive question Can you tell me something good to read?, join readers’ groups for lively discussions, hook up a laptop and do some work in what many people (including me) feel is one of the best settings in the world–surrounded by walls and shelves of books.

For now, we still have Barnes & Noble, a few smaller chains, independent stores, and our libraries. If we lose those, too, and all reading is dependent on devices, will we be returning to an age when only the privileged have access to learning? Where reading is a luxury denied to a majority of people whose lives consist of work and more work and the struggle to provide food, clothing, and healthcare to their families? Where the newspapers are gone, and the magazines are gone, and maybe some entity just a little crazy and greedy and power mad can silence the fibers and air waves of our televisions, radios, computers, smart phones, and e-readers to keep us focused on whatever is needed to keep the crazy/greedy/power-mad at the top of the heap of humanity?

Maybe it was a stress dream after all…

And run, if you will, to the top of the hill…

Usually when I’m pushing my cart (what we Southerners call “buggy”) through the grocery store, I’m only dimly aware of the music. Possibly that’s because it’s consistently overridden by garbled voices calling for things that sound like “krsshree macxchlt line frizhnotu.” Today, I found myself humming along to something before my brain said, “What the hell is that song? WHAT IS IT?” So I had to stop and strain to hear it over “zhrezhre fundx floral bijonit.” Finally I realized what it was and that I hadn’t heard it since the early Cretaceous Period.

It was one of my mother’s favorite songs. I figured hearing it right then was her way of telling me I spend too much on groceries. Or else she wanted me to know “lidzntk fovbw cphryq.”

September 16 is my father’s birthday. He’d have been 97. His own father died at the age of 96. It’s hard not to wish I’d have gotten that many years with my father, but I’m grateful for every one I had. I made a slideshow to remember him using the song I heard today–because he wouldn’t have had the life he enjoyed, with the children and grandchildren he adored, without his Dorothy Jean.

ETA 2022: Regrettably, the site that hosted my videos deleted them, and the computer they were on died. I can no longer watch them, either.

Button Sunday

Over the past couple of weeks leading up to this date, I’ve thought a lot about how we grieve. There’s only one sure thing I believe I’ve learned from my personal losses, from my experience with hospice, with veterans’ awareness, and with AIDS and particularly the NAMES Quilt.

That sure thing is this: Every individual processes grief in his or her own time.

Not all ways of grieving are healthy or helpful ways, but those who grieve need compassion, not judgment.

However you choose to observe this anniversary, or if you choose not to, I wish for any of you who are reading this a day in which you feel love, know hope, hear laughter, extend courtesy, receive kindness.

End of an era

My mother was an avid magazine reader. I can remember from the time I was a child what seemed to be a steady flow from the mailbox to her lap, as she curled up in her favorite chair, cigarettes and ashtray at hand, and depending on the time of day, her cup of black coffee, iced tea (sweetened), Diet Rite, Coke, Tab, or Diet Coke on the table next to her. The magazines: Time, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Look, Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Redbook, TV Guide, Southern Living. No matter where we lived, those magazines with their articles and fiction, recipes and photos, were a constant. But since the times were a’changin’ as fast as our addresses, she also read Mad, Rolling Stone, Ms., and Mother Jones. I don’t think there was any magazine she wouldn’t read, and even after she lived on a fixed income, she kept up a few subscriptions.


She’s holding Joe Willie the cat here, but next to the end table, you can see her bucket o’ magazines. If your eyes are really sharp, you can also see her lit cigarette. She’s in her early forties in this photo.

By the time she died in 2008, those magazines were coming to her at my address.


Even though I wasn’t as absorbed by them as I apparently was in infancy, I would flip through them and then find homes for them: waiting rooms in clinics and doctors’ offices, Lynne’s break room at work, online friends who might enjoy them. Finally the subscriptions began to run out, and today I got this with the October issue of the lone remaining subscription:

The slogan for Ladies’ Home Journal is “Never underestimate the power of a woman.” I concur, but I would add, “Never underestimate the power of a woman who reads.” A lifetime of books and magazines kept a woman who had to drop out of school in eighth grade to take care of sick family members–whose only work outside the home was as a hospital, Red Cross, and museum volunteer–smart, savvy, aware, and connected to generations of men and women, many of whom thought she was pretty damn special. When I saw my nephew recently, he recounted a story of how her “boys” (a group of gay men who befriended her in her seventies) were going to throw a Wizard of Oz party, at which she would go in character as Dorothy (which was, after all, her name). They were able to find everything for her costume except the ruby slippers–so essential that without them, the party was canceled.

No matter; she pretty much thought all of life was her party, and everything she read was her guidebook for making it more interesting.