Mother of the year

Child: The cats kept me awake making digging and ripping sounds in my room last night.
Me:  No, that was the monsters.
Child:  No, this was around 3am.
Me:  Yeah, the monsters. You know, the ones under your bed?
Child:  NO, the sound was over by the window.
Me:  Well they DO come out at night.
Child:  [walks away, comes back] I've worked it out. You know the hole the cats made in my net curtain? The cat has made it big enough for her head cone.

Can I have my Mother of the Year Award now?

It's okay to be Takei

I'm sure no one cares what a straight, white, middle aged, middle class housewife and mother thinks about any of this. But this is what online journals are for, right?

Sexual Orientation and Stuff

The other night, Milk, the film about Harvey Milk was on television. I'd never managed to see it before, so I stayed up and watched. I moved to San Francisco in 1989. While nothing is perfect, it was shocking to see how different it was not so very many years before. People getting killed just for being gay. Long time partners called "tricks" by the police. People being shunned by local businesses for their orientation. But the men banded together and changed their community. The SF I moved to was a loving, accepting place. If there were hate crimes, I didn't hear about them, or at least not often. My SF had men kissing men on the bus, women kissing women in restaurants, and no batted and eye. In my SF, it didn't matter how weird or eccentric you were, there was always someone more weird or eccentric. You might find someone walking home on a Sunday morning in chaps, a thong, and boots, and nothing else. He probably had a good time the night before. You might see someone wearing only feathers. Whatever. Me? I was mousy and plain, which was a bit of a relief after being considered weird for so much of my life. So we all just got on with it, trying to make SF a place where all were welcome to be themselves. As long as you weren't hurting someone who hadn't consented to being hurt, it was all good. But Milk showed men being brutally murdered just for who they loved. Not my SF. Thank you, Harvey, for helping make it a city I love.

Last night I had another television encounter. Boys Don't Cry. I had never even heard of the film, nor of the real life person who inspired it. I was cringing the whole time because I knew up front from the warnings that there was going to be sexual and non-sexual violence. I imagine Brandon had to live with the knowledge of that possibility his whole life. I guess everyone has to be careful and aware of possibilities, but more so for this young man. When it was over, I looked him up. His grave stone says sister, daughter, friend. His mother apparently is cheesed off with the media for persistently referring to him as "he." I am cheesed off with his mother. The wikipedia also informed me that the real person who inspired the girlfriend character wanted it known she did NOT stick with Brandon romantically after finding out he didn't have boy bits. I thought the nicest part of the film was when her fictional self said they could still go away together. But no.

If we're making this a theme post, I'll add in that I am following @ChazBono on twitter. I don't watch dance shows, so his performance has little to do with my entertainment, but I support him anyway. I remember watching Chaz appear at the end of the Sonny and Cher hour when I was a child myself. In a way, Chaz belongs to all of us because we were given the person to care about. America's little girl. More recently, Cher has asked people to not attack her child, but to go for her instead. That makes no sense to me. Chaz is putting himself out there to make sure we all "know" someone who is trans. Someone we've always cared about. Chaz is an adult making a stand. His mother ought to stand beside him, not in front of him.

My main interest is seeing if the fat man can dance. He doesn't look very nimble. But from what little I know of the show, they pair someone who isn't especially known for their natural grace with someone who dances for a living. Then the pro dancer teaches the novice. Is that right? So maybe none of the celebs are expected to be wonderful.

I don't have a problem with Chaz, and I hope he hasn't got a problem with me.

It could be argued that I have no right to comment about any of this because I am not gay or queer or trans, and this has nothing to do with me. But it does. This is my species, you know? I'm not as tuned in to the issues and concerns as someone who lives it every day, but I try to read and understand and be glad to know about more ways to be human. I don't want to speak for anyone else, but I do want to listen.

I've never had to come out with a sexual orientation. The one that feels normal and natural to me turns out to be the one society assumes I'll have. Born that way, what can I say? I do have a fear of coming out experience, admittedly not the same. I never came out to my mother as a non-religious person. It was pretty obvious, but saying it would have both hurt her and triggered horrid attempts to repair me. It would have fundamentally changed our relationship. I didn't pretend to be religious, but I never flat out told her where I stood. So I sort of have an experience I can use to identify the feelings. Not the same, no, but nothing is. No two people are the same. No two families are the same.

But what I think about these things now is not what I have always thought. I was raised to be homophobic. I don't feel homophobic, but that is what was taught at home. My mother told me explicitly many times during my teen years that homosexuality is a sin, and that people who did those things or thought those things were going to Hell.

My mother could not have done it on her own, though. I grew up knowing that a lot of what she said was not right for me. I recall her telling me that sex was only for getting babies, and if you did it, even when married, for reasons other than procreation, it was a sin. Now this was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so there was a lot on television to let me know that some women liked sex. I wanted to be one of them. I decided at some tender, single digit age that I was prepared to go to Hell if that's what it took to enjoy sex with my husband.

One time my mother was trying to get me to learn to sew. I was eight and just wanted to play. I found sewing frustrating, and I didn't want to do it. As I stormed away, she called after me, "If you don't learn to sew, you'll never get married!" "FINE!" I bellowed back. And I didn't learn to sew. And I didn't get married until I was 38. I got to spend all those 30 years telling people my mother was right, since I wasn't married.

So we've established that I wasn't the sort of child to just buy any old thing my mother told me was true.

No, it was woven through the culture I grew up in. It was the whole culture. I went to school, where words like gay, faggot, queer, dyke, and so on were used as insults and fighting words. I never got hit or anything, but I knew that being called any of those words meant trouble was coming. The phobia was all around me. Paying attention to things like that is a personal safety issue.

When I say I think I didn't feel homophobic, I mean I didn't feel hatred. I didn't feel the need to lash out or change anyone, but I was afraid of advances. I just didn't have the tools. So the fear did go in.

I encountered the occasional lesbian, and even more occasionally one expressed an interest in me. I was terrified. There it is. Fear. In the world in which I was raised, girls were not trained to say no. It took ages to learn to accept the flattery and politely decline unwanted advances. To be fair, I had to learn to do it with boys, too.

My mother's answer to attraction and advances issues for herself was not to doll herself up, to look put together but not in any way available. We kids didn't really learn how to doll up, either. The way you avoid unwanted advances was to be unappealing. Unwantable. If you made people want you, bad things happened, and those things were your own fault.

In my early 20s, a guy I vaguely knew from high school informed me that I was a lesbian. He knew because I didn't doll up, and I didn't respond to male advances. I said I wasn't, and I actually had a boyfriend at the time. He told me I was wrong, and definitely a dyke. Now I would probably thank him for the compliment, but back then I was frightened by his perception. He'd called me by words that got people hurt or killed or socially outcast, and even though he seemed fairly mild about his pronouncement, I felt threatened. I wonder how I would have felt if I'd had that same conversation with him and actually been a lesbian. Given the culture we were in, I probably would have been even more terrified.

But I learned and I grew and I got to know more people. I found out that it's not scary, it's just people. My species.

Fast forward fifteen years or so, and I thought I was pretty cool with it all, but then my own sister came out to me in an email. She said she was a lifelong lesbian, but thought that if she was devout enough in her religion, she could get over it. From childhood she'd always asked for religious books which she hoped would help her sort herself out. She was very active in her religion, which happened to be one without a lot of room for single people and no room at all for homosexuals. Finally she got over the religion instead and decided to live her life as the person she really was. I was shocked. I'd known her my whole life, how could she keep such a secret?

I moaned about it to a friend at work, a lesbian. She told me to get over myself. She said it was my sister's life, her choices, and absolutely her decision to tell who she wanted when she wanted. Or to not tell anyone. I had no right to know anything., and it had nothing to do with me. I should just be flattered that she wanted to tell me at all. And of course she was right. I'm so glad she verbally slapped me around. That was an important thing for me to hear, and I still apply it to a lot of situations.

Of course there had been other secrets in our family, so it's possible that the deception perception was coloured by that. But I still needed to be told to get over myself.

So here we are today, and if I see two men or two women kissing, I'm happy they don't have to hide their love, that they feel safe. If someone is born into the wrong body and can do something to feel more like themselves, I'm glad they have that option. If someone feels it makes sense for them to love a lot of people, I hope they treat everyone with respect and I'm glad they can be happy. None of those things hurt me, and the happiness enhances everyone. Plus, it's much easier to live life just being happy for people.

Which is not to say I am not judgmental or evil or nasty. I am. But not about this.

So now I am a mother, and I make sure my child knows that love is love. He knows that some boys marry boys and some boys marry girls. He knows about sex change operations, that some people feel like boys but are born into girl bodies, that some girls are born into boy bodies. I ask him if he would still feel like a boy without his body telling him so, and ask him to imagine he has all his same feelings, but was born into a girl body. I don't know if empathy and understanding can be taught, but I'm trying. He's aware that some people feel like different sexes at different times, although we haven't discussed that one at length yet.

A few years back we were sitting in Dolores Park in SF, and someone came up and asked us for contributions for No on 8. One of our friends contributed $20, so there was paperwork to do. They didn't just take cash, they documented where every bit came from. While forms were filled in, my (then seven year old) son asked me what it was all about. It took me a minute to think of it in child words, but I said "Right now I know you want to marry a certain girl, but when you grow up and get ready to get married, you might find that the person you love most, the person you want to be a family with and spend your life with, is another man. There are people who want to say you can't marry a man. Is that right?" And my sweet little boy shouted out NO! "And that is what NO on 8 means, that it's not right." The volunteer endorsed my description, and smiled and said she liked it put that way. It's nice to have the small validations.

A few months later there was a vote, which did not go as we'd hoped. When I told my son what happened, he was at first disappointed, then angry, then slowly he turned to me, hands straight down but in fists, and said slowly, "Mummy, did YOU vote yes or no on this?" At the age of seven, he was prepared to fight me if I'd given the wrong answer. I hope it would have been verbal fighting, he's not a violent kid.

So the mothers continue to teach the children. Let's hope it all gets better and better with each new generation. Let's hope that whatever shadows of prejudices remain in me will just seem ridiculous to my grandchildren.

Give me a minute... just looking around.