Reading Rambo

Pride was always an act of defiance.


Even when I came out in 2011, and things were so much easier than when Chicago held its first Pride Parade (one year after the Stonewall riots) - even then, we still had civil unions instead of marriage equality, the Defense of Marriage Act seemed to have an impossibly secure foothold in America, and the idea of protective bills for LGBT citizens passing was, if not laughable, quixotic. We're still working on that one.

At the parade in 2013, we celebrated United States v. Windsor, and the ability for people to have their marriage recognized at a federal level. In 2014 we were fighting for it to be recognized everywhere, and in 2015, Justice Anthony Kennedy said "Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right."


After last year, I was done being defiant for Pride. I wouldn't g…

This week. Nothing like waking up in a hotel room, turning on the TV and watching with ever-mounting horror as a police chief says that now they are estimating 50 people have died in a mass shooting and the crowd of seasoned reporters in front of him audibly gasps.

The emphasis I have seen from almost everyone around me on love and joy in the face of anger and fear, and the renewed-with-a-passion demand to ban semi-automatic weapons, have both filled me with pride in humanity and a commitment to the idea that we are doing better and we will continue to do better.

With that in mind, what are things that make you happy? I looked around my immediate surroundings and found so many.

My Vertigo necklace.





When I went to San Francisco for my 30th birthday/Vertigo self-guided tour, I stopped at the Mission Dolores, where Scottie follows Madeleine, and I bought this. I just-I just love Vertigo so much, you guys.



When I wear this, it reminds me of that trip and how awesome it was traipsing up and do…

I am here to read the books you would never ever want to read and then summarize the best bits for you.

I recently finished D. Michael Quinn's Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example. I picked it up because I was watching Ken Burns's The West, and there's an episode about the Mormons. It discusses the Mormon's western exodus and Mormon women's role in women's suffrage. Obviously I was interested in this, but my ears also perked up when it brought up Emmeline B. Wells, a Mormon woman who advocated polygamy because:

The world says polygamy makes women inferior to men -- we think differently. Polygamy gives women more time for thought, for mental culture, more freedom of action, a broader field of labor... and leads women more directly to God, the fountain of all truth. 
Wells's strong leadership in Utah suffrage made me interested in Mormon women's history, but more particularly I wanted to see if there were an LGBT history of …

Roberta Kaplan is the lawyer who the LGBT population and its opposition watched unswervingly as she took the case of United States v. Windsor all the way to the Supreme Court in 2013, ultimately arguing for and achieving the striking down of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which prohibited gay and lesbian married couples from being recognized at the federal level, thereby denying them Social Security benefits, joint tax filing, military pensions for bereaved spouses, and over 1000 other rights given to all other married couples in the United States.



Then Comes Marriage is necessary to a nation that is already taking marriage equality for granted. For LGBT citizens, this may be a self-protective instinct. There was so much heartache and disappointment, so many horrible things said, and a seemingly insurmountable wall of majority disapproval, that forgetting it seems the best way to move on. But if we remember how hard it was to get here, we treasure it all the more.

Kap…

I can't imagine what my life would have been like if I had grown up knowing that marrying a woman was possible. I can imagine growing up seeing the disgust on my mom's face when Ellen came out, the uproar the country went into when Hawaii was on the verge of legalizing marriage equality in 1996, and the years of being told that the Bible clearly states being gay is not okay.

From today on, children growing up in America will see marriage equality as totally normal. They won't grow up seeing it debated in legislatures and hearing their potential marriage compared to incest and bestiality because the HIGHEST COURT IN THE LAND talked about "equal dignity in the eyes of the law" and declared marriage for all a fundamental right. 

This is huge. This is progress. This is human beings realizing experiences beyond their own are okay. This is us still having a long way to go in terms of civil rights, but this is such a big step to take along the way.

Let's just close wit…

I need to review Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, but first, WTF kind of game are you trying to play, Once Upon a Time? These are people's hearts on the line and you pull this kind of shit. I am not having it. 



I mean, what the hell. You can take a swim in an overly polluted rabid shrimp-infested lake, Once Upon a Time writers. You give us that look exchange between Emma Swan and Regina "The Mayor" Mills? QUEERBAITING SHALL NOT CONTINUE. (...#SwanQueenForever)

Now. I read a book by Sarah Vowell. As previously noted, I have a born-from-loneliness attachment to Sarah Vowell, as her book Assassination Vacation was there for me at a time when everyone around me spoke French and I just wanted a hamburger. Since then, I've read all her books as they've come out, and fervidly recommend them all. This was the last one to read, aside from her book about listening to the radio which, unless someone shoves a copy at me...I'm not readin'…

Carmilla, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, is 108 pages long, Victorian, and about a lady vampire.

I've been hearing about this book for a long time, but kept putting it off because A) Didn't sound like it'd be good B) I kept thinking it was 18th century and C) I didn't really feel like reading another thing where a lesbian's a life-sucking creature out to defile your daughters (I mean, only the latter part's even accurate).

But then the webseries Carmilla came out, and Tumblr wouldn't stop talking about it because it had lesbians and that's pretty much all that site needs, so I finally sat down and watched all of season 1. And you know what, it's not great. But Laura, the lead, is so cute and Natasha Negovanlis who plays Carmilla is so much fun to watch be grumpy that I've started watching it all over again. So it made me want to read the book. 


Carmilla was published in 1872, which predates Bram Stoker's Dracula by a good 26 years. It's about a …

Work is deathly boring today (Halloween pun kind of!), so here is my unsolicited post capturing pretty much everything I tweeted about The L Word, the show that carves your heart out with a spork, then throws its head back and laughs.

All you need to know is that Tina and Bette have been together seven years at the beginning of the show and are the cutest ever, and then Bette cheats on Tina at the end of season one and EVERYTHING GOES TO HELL AND THERE IS NO RETURNING. (...until season 5). Oh, and also Jenny is the worst.




TWEETS:

-How my day was supposed to go: clean room, get life in order. How my day went: watched 12 episodes of The L Word. So that's great.

-"I don't want a relationship with you; I just wanna be with you all the time." #stillwatchingthelword

-Wait, Bette and Tina make out while stuck in an elevator? Is this show fanfic on film? IS IT? (yes) 

-me: "GUESS WHAT I MARATHONED? The L Word." Doug (who has to talk to me all the time): "Noooooo!&qu;…