Numb

I should feel angry or upset or confused, I know. The California Supreme Court has decided 6-1 to let stand an amendment to the state's constitution that singles out gays and lesbians as a distinct class of people for whom the rights of marriage are not available. I should be joining my tribe in the streets marching for equality and demanding that we be treated the same as anyone else who wants the privilege of marrying whomever we choose. However, all I feel inside is numb. I don't have the energy to march just yet; I'm still too shaken.

I understand that the court was not being asked to consider anything regarding the "rightness" of Proposition 8, a hateful, mean-spirited attempt to keep gays and lesbians as second class citizens. I know that the court could only consider whether or not the change was an amendment and not a revision to the constitution, with a revision requiring much more rigorous steps to enact. I acknowledge that it was perhaps outside the purview of the court to strike down the alleged "will of the people" when our constitution explicitly allows for ballot propositions.

Still, I had hoped that the court might decide that the public should not be granted permission to determine to which rights a group has access. I knew it was a long shot, as did almost everyone I know who had discussed this issue since November, but still we thought there might be a chance. It has, for the most part, been the court system, not the people or the legislatures, that has ensured the protection of civil rights and ensured equality and fairness for everyone. Instead, what we are left with is a court determined to let the forces of bigotry win out. How can we expect a public vote on the rights of a minority ever to result in protections for the minority?

I'm very puzzled over how the court can say, on one hand, that Proposition 8 is merely a minor change that doesn't keep gays and lesbians from enjoying all of the privileges of the state's laws and then say, on the other hand, that the 18,000 or so gay couples who managed to get married last summer have legally recognized relationships that are true marriages. The actual decision states, "Although Proposition 8 eliminates the ability of same-sex couples to enter into an official relationship designated as 'marriage,' in all other respects those couples continue to possess, under the state constitutional privacy and due process clauses, 'the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage.'... Like opposite-sex couples, same sex couples enjoy this protection not as a matter of legislative grace, but constitutional right." How is that possible without the legal designation of marriage? It is a legal term for very specific reasons and with very specific benefits. The court adds that Proposition 8 "does not otherwise affect the state's obligation to enforce the equal protection clause by protecting the 'fundamental right...of same-sex couples to have their official family relationships accorded the same dignity, respect, and stature as that accorded to all other official recognized family relationships.'" How can our relationships be considered the "same" without having the same legal status?

I've read some blogs and articles that have already compared this decision to the infamous Dred Scott case or to Plessy v. Ferguson. Those were U.S. Supreme Court decisions that let stand the cruel tyranny of slavery and that established the discriminatory practice of "separate but equal." Those rulings have since become part of the more shameful aspects of our history, and I can only hope that Tuesday's ruling joins them soon.

As I've said before, I have no one to marry. But I would still like to have the option should the opportunity arise at some point in the future. As of now, convicts are allowed to marry, but not me. People who have been married and divorced several times are allowed to marry, but not me. Horny teenagers are allowed to marry, albeit sometimes with the required permission of their parents, but tnot me. People who have chosen their spouses on a television show are allowed to marry, but not me. People who are way past the age at which they could procreate are allowed to marry, but not me. Hell, even people who get drunk on a weekend trip to Las Vegas are allowed to marry, but not me. Well, I suppose that's not entirely true. I could marry a woman. I would merely have to deny my true self and submit to a lie in order to make those so-called people of religious faith feel appeased. Then I'd have to spend the rest of my existence unhappy because I couldn't be with the kind of person to whom I am truly attracted.

Someday, perhaps during my lifetime, all of this will be over. People will write dissertations for degrees in history about the marriage debate and how it all ended with full equality across the United States. Someday. For now, though, my options are to move to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Maine, or Iowa, where marriage is legal for my tribe, at least for now, or to continue living in a state that considers me to be a lesser citizen than its heterosexual residents or even a small group of gays and lesbians who were lucky enough to make it under the deadline. I still don't quite comprehend how there can be a right that is available only from March to November of one year. How can you take away a right that the court itself said last year should be granted in order to achieve the equal protection promised by the constitution?

So I don't yet know what I'm going to do. I will probably join the marches this weekend because, yes, there will continue to be marches and protests. I will donate what money I can to the groups trying to get a ballot proposition for 2010 or 2012 to reverse the amendment. I might eventually locate my anger (my rage, really) at the decision and at the people who are so narrow-minded that they cannot even listen to the pleas for equality, but I will certainly listen to our leaders who will have suggestions for how we should respond. I just don't know yet. I'm still too numb.

Billy G.

During my first year teaching full-time at my college, I received a Valentine's Day card. I was addressed to me and was signed "Billy G." I had no idea who this was, and I didn't say anything out of fear that it might be a student who had misplaced his affections. The second time I received a card, though, I noticed that lots of other people had also gotten a card from Billy G. When I asked some of them if they know who he was, they told me it was one of my colleagues who teaches in the Reading Department. Every year since then, without fail, I have received a card on Valentine's Day from him, and so has every other employee at the college. It's a campus legend at this point.

On Friday night, we celebrated Billy G. and his 47 years of teaching at our school. He has been a full-time teacher longer than I have been alive, yet he has more energy than I do most days. He gets so excited talking about his classes and his students and the subject of opera that he literally jumps in the air. He is so beloved by his students, and I have yet to meet another teacher or staff member or administrator who doesn't have fond words to say about him.

In addition to reading classes, he has been teaching an Opera Appreciation class for many years now, and he would arrange trips to New York during Spring Break for members of his class and other interested people. One year, Partner At The Time and I went on this trip. I had never been to an opera in my life. My first was Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg (or something close to that) at the Metropolitan Opera House. Billy G. was our guide and host. We walked out after nearly four hours of opera, and he was so excited that he wanted to go clubbing or to a coffee shop and talk for hours. (He must be in his 70s, at least.) Not even a full day of sightseeing and intense Wagnerian drama could tire him out.

Whenever he sees me on campus, Billy G. always puts his hands on my shoulders and says, to anyone who happens to be nearby, "I love this guy!" If you're ever in a bit of a down mood, he's sure to make you feel better. I've never walked away from a conversation with him without feeling happier.

On Friday, we ate a lot of pasta, we had a few toasts and tributes, we sang (badly) a farewell song to the tune of "O Solo Mio," and we hugged Billy G. We also listened to one of the most gracious farewell speeches. He paid tribute to his colleagues more than anything else, and it was touching to see so many people who had retired even before I started work there in 1994 come back to honor him on this special night.

Next year, there will be no Valentine's Day card from Billy G., and I don't know who is going to grab me by the shoulders and say, "I love this guy!" any more. One of the great ones is retiring and moving to Oregon to be near his family, and our college will be all the poorer for no longer having his shining presence.

Mother's Day

She was just a senior in high school when she became pregnant with me. As happens far too often in such cases, she and her boyfriend, my father, fought a lot after she found out she was pregnant, and they broke up before I was born, never to marry. She tried to hide her pregnancy as long as possible from my grandparents, but eventually, she was just too large to keep it a secret. I was born two months after she graduated from high school.

She had been a star basketball player. There had even been people from the Redheads, a national women's basketball team, who had talked to her about joining the team. My grandparents, her mother and father, objected, of course, not wanting her to leave the small town in Mississippi where they lived. She never got to go to college on a basketball scholarship or on an academic scholarship, and as a result, she never had much of a chance to obtain the kind of high-paying job that her intelligence--she graduated fourth in her class--might have warranted. She worked most of her life as a secretary for an international pharmaceutical company.

She met another man and fell in love with him a couple of years after I was born. They married and had a son, my brother, three years younger than I am. The new husband wasn't overly fond of being a parent to someone else's son, so I wound up living with my grandparents, an arrangement that lasted for the rest of my childhood. My mother and this man (the anger is still there, yes) moved to Illinois, where they both found work, and she eventually realized he was not a good husband and father. They divorced, but she and my brother stayed in Illinois. She once told me that the hardest choice she ever made in her life was leaving me with my grandparents, and it really hurt her when she asked me while I was still just a child if I wanted to move up north with her and I said that I wanted to stay with my grandparents. I had known no other life at that point, and I was scared to leave what seemed so comfortable at the time.

It was almost a decade before she found another man to marry. He's a good man, this new stepfather, incredibly patient and funny and generous. He had three kids of his own from an earlier marriage, so we made an odd "Brady Bunch" with our three boys and two girls. Family trips in the summer were an experience with everyone piled into the back seat and then two motel rooms at night to keep the peace. For the most part, though, we got along well, and eventually, we all grew up and went to work or off to college. We became adults with lives and careers and issues of our own, and they became the people we call or visit every now and then.

Both of them are retired now. She loves going to the casinos to gamble away my inheritance. He loves to golf. She's become very enamored of the first great-grandchild. He's two and spends a lot of time with Papa and Gam Ma. He was there today, in fact, when I called to wish her a Happy Mother's Day. He was sleeping at the time, so we were able to talk uninterrupted.

I sent flowers, of course, two dozen pink roses, which she loved. She stopped our conversation a couple of times to smell them again. Her favorites are wild flowers, but I couldn't find a nice enough bouquet of those to send. I had also mailed two cards, one serious and one funny, our tradition for such events. We talked for more than an hour, with her telling me about the squirrels in the backyard and then about all of the people back home who are either ill or who have died. Our conversations are very stream-of-consciousness.

I only see her about once a year if I'm lucky. I try to go back to my grandfather's house for Thanksgiving when I can so that I can be with them all, but the trip is expensive and at a very bad time of year for travel, both airplane-wise and work-wise. I also try to call when I can, but she and my stepfather have been known to hop into the car and just drive to any place they might be interested in seeing. After they retired, they took a tour of the Great Plains. No one was really told they were doing this. They just loaded up the car and drove.

I love my mother, and I tell her this whenever I talk to her. I know she hasn't always understood me. She didn't quite fathom why I majored in journalism or later in English and history. She didn't truly understand what graduate school was or why I wanted to go to it. She doesn't quite get what all I do in my current job or perhaps even what a community college is. And she certainly didn't want to deal with her elder son being gay when I chose to come out to her at the age of 30.

But you know what she did? She grew and evolved. After six months of silence, she started to ask me questions. She met my Partner At The Time and really liked him. I think she might have been even more distraught over our break-up than I was. She still tries to ask me if I'm dating anyone, so hopeful is she about my love life, but I try to avoid that disaster of a topic if I can. And she called me the day after the election last November to tell me how sorry she was that Proposition 8 passed. She kept saying she couldn't understand why it was anyone's business who her son marries.

She still brags about me to all of her friends. She used to share my grade reports with the other people at her job, and she kept pictures of my college graduation up for years after I started to get gray hair. She was so excited when I was chosen Teacher of the Year for my school that she took the program from the event to everyone's house for months after that. She asks me about events on campus that she has never attended but which she knows are important to me. She makes it clear that she supports me.

She won't read this, by the way. She and my stepfather are pretty serious technophobes, particularly him. She just knows that I did a son's duty today and called to say hello and catch up. She got her flowers and her cards, and she's happy because I remembered. She will tell my stepfather what we talked about, and she'll even share the conversation with the two-year-old great-grandchild, who only knows me by the picture that I gave her for Christmas five years ago. I hope she knows, though, that my love for her goes deeper than just the flowers and cards and phone calls. I'd see her more often if either one of us were able to do so, but I think she understands that we each have lives to lead. That's one of the most dear of lessons I learned from her and her confidence in me all these years.

The picture above is one of my favorites of her. She must have been in high school when it was taken. I have no idea whose car it was. I just look at her face and see a young girl with all of the promise of the future ahead of her. I like to think that there's still some of that optimistic young girl in her.

The Halfway Mark

This is turning out to be a particularly brutal week. It's only Wednesday, and I already feel like I've put in two full weeks of work in three days.

A quick recap:

Monday was the End-of-the-Year Celebration for the Transfer Achievement Program. I managed to squeeze this in during my lunch break.

Tuesday was the Humanities Division Scholarship Tea. I presented one of the honorable mention recipients for the Creative Writing Award, and I got to present the biggie, the English Scholarship.

Wednesday was the day I promised to take my lunch hour to conduct student evaluations for a colleague. It was also the day of the Interclub Council Awards, but since I didn't get nominated for the "Advisor of the Year" Award again this year, I didn't see any point in going. The students in the club I advise can never seem to get their act together to nominate themselves for "Club of the Year," and no one ever seems to recall that I'm their advisor. Sigh.

Here's what is yet to come:

Tomorrow is the annual luncheon honoring retirees. It's a barbecue, and luckily this year, it falls during the time I'm free for lunch. That's not often the case.

Friday is the Men and Women of Distinction Banquet. I am serving once again as co-emcee for the event, and I'm presenting one of the men during the ceremony. I have to be at rehearsal at noon since I wasn't able to participate last year and now have no idea how the new venue is set up. The banquet doesn't start until 6 p.m., so I'm either going to nap in my office or go to a movie that afternoon during my break.

Saturday is a retirement party at a local restaurant for an instructor who has been working at our college longer than I've been alive. He officially retired in December but has been teaching part-time for us this semester. He's moving after the semester ends, and we're honoring his 46 (!) years of teaching with a dinner in his honor.

Did I neglect to mention that I still have classes to teach while all of this is going on? In fact, three of the classes (both sections of freshman comp and my American literature class) have submitted rough drafts that I have to read and return this week. The two developmental writing classes have individual conferences this week, so I've been spending four hours at a time sitting down with students and trying to help them get their last essay ready to be handed it.

All of this would be fine if I didn't get up at Insane O'Clock each morning to go to work. I should be going to bed at Stupid O'Clock in order to get enough sleep, but I can never seem to manage it. (Thanks to the Stephanie Miller Show for the time names.)

I have a feeling that, on Saturday night, I'm going to come home and collapse face first onto the rug in the living room. I'm just hoping that I wake up in time to come back to work on Monday. I don't know when I'm expected to do my laundry or go grocery shopping, and the newspapers are beginning to pile up. Before this week is done, this apartment may look like the interior of Grey Gardens. All I'll need is a few dozen cats and maybe a raccoon or two.

Poem in Your Pocket

Yesterday was the last day of National Poetry Month. It was dubbed "Poem in Your Pocket Day," a day when you're supposed to share with other people a favorite poem. (See, you carry it around in your pocket so that you're always ready to read it aloud to anyone you meet.) As in recent years, I photocopied some poems to share with my classes, and I tucked a couple of other poems into my back pocket and read them to colleagues and friends.

The first is one of my all-time favorites. It is, of course, by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

The second is a more recent poem. It's entitled "The Next Poem Could Be Your Last," and it's by the great Rafael Campo.

Imagine death. No fun. No poetry.
No further arguments with relatives.
No work to do. No boring life to live.
Imagine, death: like making pottery
Or writing eulogies, it takes some skill
To do it passably. Like argument,
It needs resistance to be shaped against.
Like relatives you fight the urge to kill,
You know you won't. Like work, there's never less
Of it. Imagine: death is almost life.
Except it's fascinating, like a knife.
You lose yourself just staring at the edge.
You lose yourself and suddenly you're not
Alive, you're dying and for fun you try
To write your eulogy. You tell some lies,
Pretend you're wry and brave. Imagine that.

The last poem I carried yesterday was not shared with everyone. Only a select few got to hear it. It's Aaron Smith's "Clarification," and it's one of the few good poems about sex and/or sexuality that I've read in recent years.

Last night I followed a man
around a bar hoping to brush
against his green T-shirt
to feel the pad of his chest
against my shoulder
or arm, but before that
he danced with his shirt
off, tucked in the white
band of his underwear, lights
marking his body, music
making him a story whispered
ear to ear through a room.

I've been thinking
how the erotic lives in
what we're denied, the object
about to be exposed, on the verge
of coming undone.

The night we met I asked
you to take your pants off.
What I really meant was
unzip them and let them
ride low on your hips.

Two other people distributed copies of poems yesterday, and a couple more had poems to share. I'm sure my friend C celebrated Poem in Your Pocket Day, but I didn't get a chance to see her. This post should have been made yesterday, I know, but I hope the sharing of poetry continues throughout the year.