TKM

Today I learned that commercial paint colors are like racehorses, inasmuch as names once christened can never be used again. I have that on the authority of a woman who names paint shades for a living, which might be one of the most awesome jobs I’ve ever heard of. Absolutely unique color names are said to come in handy when it’s necessary to touch up your exterior, regardless of the paint’s vintage. That’s assuming you actually know its name.

 

Our house currently is painted the color of a 1950s-era avocado refrigerator, which is markedly different in appearance from the exterior paint color marketed as “Avocado.” I don’t know the correct nomenclature of our shade, as we were not in on the decision to paint our house this somewhat jaunty green. Had we been, we might have said, “Hey, how about ‘Quaking Grass’ or ‘Guacamole’?” the latter of which is also curiously different from the color marketed as “Avocado.” But due to circumstances beyond psychic control, we weren’t involved in discussions about preparing our house for sale—as it turned out, to us. Our lack of input in the staging of our home was apparent not only in its unfortunate exterior color but in the former estate’s choice to install cheap, white, wall-to-wall carpet throughout. (There are as many shades of white in carpets as in paints, so ours may have been “Face Powder” or “Sponge,” the latter of which seems like a particularly poor marketing choice given its literal description of how new homeowners can expect white carpet to interact with their dogs and cats.)

 

 

Now, 10 years after our purchase of Party Mint Manor, the house desperately needs repainting—the sponge-colored carpet, having long since absorbed too much of the spite and bile that comes with animal companionship, was replaced by laminate years ago—and we need a fresh coat of curb appeal as we are considering putting it up for sale.

 

We’re deciding to sell our home while the market is as soft and flaccid as rotting celery* not so much because we want to ensure that we get out of our property as little profit as possible but because it makes financial sense to me to maximize our savings in cost differential. I’d rather take on a probable $75,000 increase in mortgage now than, say, a $125,000 difference for a similar upgrade when houses are regarded once more as attractive lifelong investments and less as wood and stucco monuments to economic ruin. (Though, to be sure, your Uncle Jerry will continue to tell you cautionary tales about friends of friends who bought at the top of the market and continue to pay $1.2 million mortgages for homes now worth less than $70,000, and his warnings will become more shrill even as the bulk of foreclosure signs are taken down in sad, scabrous yards, because complacency is the devil and on weekends she wears a gold Century 21 coat and holds open houses with freshly baked cookies. Uncle Jerry will repeat these stories whenever you complain about your neighborhood, or discuss anything remotely related to a house, or mention money, or pet his dog. And then he will gleefully talk about having bought his own home in 1972 for two dollars, with 50 cents down, and tell you that because of Proposition 13 his property tax amounts to a small annual rebate from the Los Angeles County Assessor.)

 

 

*Were I paid to name paint shades, I would propose “Rotting Celery” over the present “Fountain Mist.” Which name is more evocative of a reliable shade in your imagination? Then again, given its inherent vividity, “Rotting Celery” has probably already been used. It may even be the actual name of our present paint shade. A namer of colors would have to have significant institutional knowledge in the field; the better to not have to waste time looking up the alluringly melancholic “Lettuce Alone” to discover that it, too, already represents its own springy yellow-green shade.

 

While one-name paint colors are common enough, the most pleasing formula seems to be x + y, with y being a food—generally one that’s cultivated—or another type of flora, and x being an illuminating adjective. Much market research has no doubt concluded that names like “Burled Redwood” are more appealing to potential consumers than, say, “Sleeping Tabby.” While a number of people loathe cats and therefore may be inclined to reject a tabby-colored home, however in imagined peaceful repose, few people object to enormous trees that smell nice. And according to marketing folks, consumers find it difficult to get past names they can’t identify with, regardless of their potential connection with the shade.

 

 

For our new primary, or “field,” exterior color we were initially thinking about something in the slate-blue family, available in shades known commercially, however vaguely, as “Americana,” “Graceful,” and “Pageant Song.” Blues, the aforementioned professional namer of color shades says, are the most difficult to name. “We always come up with ocean names,” she says, “but sometimes you get tired of ocean names!” That explains the available blue shades “Teeny Bikini,” “Hush a Bye,” and “Magic Wand.” Our blue plans came under internal scrutiny when Elizabeth’s mother reacted to our idea with a long pause, followed by, “Well, I imagine if I were looking to buy a house and it turned out to be blue, I’d just as soon drive by as go inside.”

 

Now we’re considering “Pineapple Sage,” which is between “Nettle” and “Pickled Okra” on Pittsburgh Paints’ palette of mossy greens. Or maybe “Pea Soup.” Either could be nicely offset with a trim color of “Fuzzy Unicorn” or “Popcorn Ball.” But frankly, I’m overwhelmed by the 1,960 colors the brand offers and I kind of wish that someone would show me just 12 and force me to choose from those.

 

Maybe I shouldn’t be so invested in the final result anyway. With any luck we’ll make this real estate transition soon, and it will then fall to the next owner to live with our unfortunate choices for the next 10 years, just as Elizabeth and I have borne the consequences of the former owners’ grasshopper-pie whimsy. Because why customize your home to suit your personal aesthetic when you can instead sigh at it daily for over a decade? We’ve saved up our DIY energy to make ill-informed home improvements that we’re hoping won’t make the next potential buyer drive by rather than come inside, and I’m coming to think that any color we choose will make at least half the people groan. Who knew that slate blue could be so disagreeable? Maybe we should try being less inoffensive to the mass market and instead make our home irresistible to the one person who’s dying for a “Candied Yam” exterior with a nice “Banana Pudding” trim. If nothing else, it would be a fitting farewell to the neighbors across the street.

We’re getting a goat!

Not me and my wife—our property isn’t zoned for hooved animals. Probably not horned animals either. Wait, are there any horned animals who don’t have hooves? Horns and paws? Or claws? I know we’re zoned for clawed animals because of the cannibalistic KFC-eating chicken from across the street.

No, we’ll be keeping our goat in Rwanda under the stewardship of my sister Valerie Mukamana, who has made real my 3½-year-old wish to effect positive change in someone’s life through the awesomely powerful gift of livestock.

Those who have read my blog for some length of time may recall posts about my first two Rwandan sisters, here and here. We were matched via Women for Women International, an organization through which I’ve been delighted to discover that, somewhere, my measly monthly contribution of $27 can still be parlayed into something more than three lunches at Baja Fresh.

To recap, on my drive to work one morning in March 2006, I heard an NPR story about a neighborhood association near Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, that functioned as a kind of emotional support and financial aid clinic for women who survived the 1994 genocide. The listener’s window into the story was Nehrama Jambare Alphonsein, who was raped by a machete-wielding Hutu supremacist and contracted HIV as a result. At the time of the NPR story, Nehrama, then 20—she was 9 at the time of the genocide, during which raping prepubescent girls was less a matter of sexual gratification than it was just another weapon of war—was raising three children, all of whom were orphans of the mass slaughter and one of whom was born with HIV.

Compounding those circumstances, many families, including Nehrama’s, mourn openly for sons killed in the genocide yet consider the raping of their daughters a matter of great family shame and therefore a taboo topic, leaving them without healing emotional outlets.

Like many Americans, my primary lens on the genocide was Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, and as with many such nonfiction accounts of chilling, seemingly impossible human violence, I felt impotent on finishing it, like I had little recourse but to shudder and move on.

But that morning I heard Nehrama speak of her daily visits to a neighborhood organization, located an hour’s walk from her home, where women with similar experiences shared amongst themselves without fear of judgment or stigma.

And then she spoke of her goats.

She had six of them, all bred from a source goat the neighborhood association had given her to help raise her family’s standard of living beyond the subsistence they were eking out cultivating beans and potatoes on a rented plot of land. Mind you, Nehrama’s family still lived in a mud hut with no electricity or running water, but I was cheered by her success with animal husbandry—in that NPR-listener way made up of equal parts idealism and guilt, leaving us with a powerful need to believe that, however sad, everything we hear about turns out fine in the end—and I was certain that Nehrama’s growing herd would soon turn her fortunes around.

Ha! Get it? Growing herd? Heh.

How much are goats? I wondered. And how could I buy one for a woman like Nehrama?

I didn’t want to ship a goat, of course—that’s just crazy talk—so when I got to work I set about trying to find an association online like the one discussed, and that’s how I found Women for Women International, an organization dedicated to helping women in war and postwar regions rebuild their lives through a scholarship program addressing basic needs, civil rights education, life and work skills, and community leadership roles. Neato! And best of all, I could sponsor a Rwandan woman directly. I would receive a picture and profile at the beginning of our relationship, as well as a report on how she felt her circumstances had improved at the end of our year together, and in the meantime we could swap letters so that I could hear all about her exciting new life raising goats!

Yeah, well, suck it, NPR idealist. Go sell your goats somewhere else. Your Rwandan sisters had crafts to do.

My first two sisters, in exit interviews at the completion of the yearlong scholarship, both said they had gained much from the program: Each were unemployed at the start but were now self-employed. Each said their general housing conditions and health had improved, and that they had gained self-confidence and knowledge of their civil rights. All of which is GREAT. But both, when asked what skills training they had undertaken, said “Knitting.”

There’s nothing wrong with knitting, of course. Some of my best friends knit (well, one of my online friends anyway, and she’s the partner of someone who might read this, and could probably kick my ass, so I want to make sure I cover it). And because I just started to feel like kind of an asshole for being disappointed in my sisters’ knitting pursuits, I Googled Rwandans and knitting and found an organization called, well, Rwanda Knits, which says of itself, “Our program enables [Rwandan women] to increase their incomes through economically sustainable knitting cooperatives, through which they produce garments for their domestic market and export markets.” Right, like I said, knitting was a very sensible and lucrative pursuit on my sisters’ part. Besides, how can you argue with the mad skills of clinic instructor Faina?

Still, faced with a choice between working with yarn and farm animals, well, I was just hoping they would go for a nice dairy goat who would provide milk and cheese and perhaps even precious hours of amusement for the children. Not that I’m trying to tell anyone what to do with their scholarship opportunities. Or maybe I am a little, but I entered the sisterhood with a mission, and a little over $1,100 later we were still goatless. I just did a quick price check at GoatFinder.com (I know!) and discovered that goat kids start at $65—and that’s for a pedigreed, “show quality” goat sold in American dollars. Here’s a nubian kid from my new favorite site ZooBorns:

Spectacular nubian kids named Polka Dot aside, I reckon random goats bought with Rwandan francs cost a lot less.

However disappointed with the intransigence of the knitters (that just reminded me of the Knitters, the country project by members of X and the Blasters, and I wondered whether their 1985 album Poor Little Critter on the Road had ever been issued on CD, and not only has it, I found, but they put out an album in 2005 that I didn’t even know about; free association rocks!), I shouldered on to be matched with a third sister, which is where Valerie Mukamana comes in.

Valerie said in her entrance interview that she had received no schooling and could neither read nor write more than her name—differing from my other sisters, who had both attended primary school. Each of them had sent me cards and letters during our time together, telling me about their children and husbands, asking me about my children and my husband, and asking, if it’s not too much trouble, could I possibly send a picture? (This latter wish has gone unmet; I’ve been uncomfortable with the idea of revealing my sexual orientation to my sisters, fearing emotional rejection—it is the only part of my life in which I am closeted.)

Valerie, who has a husband and five kids and, like Nehrama, said they all live in a hut with no electricity or running water, also rated her family’s general health as poor and said they rarely can access medical treatment. Of all my sisters so far, Valerie seemed in the direst straits, so I was pleased to be matched with her. But I also consciously put aside my goat obsession for another year, thinking that even if she happened to receive livestock, I wouldn’t hear about it given her inability to correspond with me.

But then, earlier this month, I did receive a letter from Valerie. Had she dictated it to someone? Had she been a superstar in the literacy program? She wasn’t telling. Instead she told me that she had started selling bananas and tomatoes at the local market to help generate income and that she hoped her family could soon upgrade from their hut to an iron-sheeted house. She said that they had not been receiving many rains and asked whether we had been receiving any here. And, of course, she wondered about my own family and asked, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could I please send a picture?

She also wrote this: “I am hoping to buy a goat and other domestic animals so that I can fight against poverty.” (!)

I would go to Rwanda right now to help Valerie pick it out, but I just checked Travelocity and it looks like flights to Kigali start at $2,500—that’s with three stops and two plane changes. As much as I’d like to meet Valerie and her new goat, it seems criminal to spend potential seed money for 38 goats to do so.

Plus, my wife just told me that if she’s going to the African continent, there are a couple, three countries, maybe 10, that would be higher on her list of must-visits than Rwanda. Go ahead, try to tell her Botswana can’t possibly be as entertaining as it seems in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (but, OMG, if you haven’t watched the HBO series, Netflix it now).

So, instead of sending myself, I’m going to have to be content with sending a letter, telling Valerie that we haven’t been receiving many rains in Southern California either. Perhaps I’ll disclose to this third sister that I have no children, but that I gained a wife last year when I married my partner of 14 years; maybe I’ll even enclose a picture of myself, and ask, if it’s not too much trouble, could she possibly send goat pics in return?

“Would you rather have your birthday presents before we go, or after we come back?” le domestique asked last Friday. She was about to whisk me away for a weekend at the El Morocco Inn, a gay-owned spa resort in Desert Hot Springs, a tiny desert town situated over a bubbling natural mineral oasis about 15 miles outside of Palm Springs.

 

“After,” I said, because I’m all about the delayed gratification.

 

That said, we took off for Riverside County, a part of California we’d given serious thought to boycotting for the foreseeable future in response to its lopsided support for Proposition 8, which its voters passed by a margin of nearly 20 percentage points (compared to Los Angeles County, where it passed by a margin of 1 point). Kiss our money goodbye, assholes! was our immediate reaction to the vote. If we need to pass through your county to get somewhere else, we’ll make sure we head out with plenty of cold drinks and a full tank of gas so that all we spend in your hellhole is toxic emissions.

 

But here’s where le resistance gets complicated. If you look at the county-by-county vote, represented here in the Los Angeles Times’ handy electoral map (use the pull-down menu to access the Prop. 8 stats) in green (where the majority voted yes) and purple (where the majority voted no), you’ll see that we gays don’t have a lot of wiggle room if we want to patronize only gay-affirming counties. While the purple parts are certainly among the loveliest parts of the state, there’s a whole lot of icky to avoid—including every county bordering Los Angeles, with the two most decisively God-loving, homo-hating counties, Kern and Tulare—which each passed the measure by a staggering margin of 50 percentage points—stacked one above the other north of L.A. County, like tiers of bile and spite atop California’s anti–gay wedding cake. (Kern, immediately bordering L.A. County, was particularly notable among California’s 58 counties for being the only one whose clerk defied the court’s marriage equality mandate by poutily ceasing all marriages through her office when she was told she couldn’t selectively deny them to same-sex couples.) When I was younger my father was fond of saying that people in Kern County “would just as soon shoot you as say hello.” His was a cautionary tale, as I was a teenager given to spontaneity, including frequent half-cocked solo driving trips in search of beauty and solace among the High Sierras, which rose majestically—and nonjudgmentally—over the Kern divide. I shrugged off his seemingly hysterical pronouncements about the locals as I drove through their towns to get to California’s most spectacular national parks, preferring to think of rural Californians as quieter types who just craved a little elbow room. Now I’m forced to rethink my position: Maybe they really would just as soon shoot me as say hello.

 

And then there’s our southerly neighboring Riverside County, another hotbed of conservatism. Yet Palm Springs, residing squarely within the county, has more gays and lesbians per capita than San Francisco—estimated at nearly 50% of the permanent population—has elected two consecutive gay mayors, and regularly seats gay city council members. And there are dozens of gay-owned resorts and businesses that damn well deserve our patronage. Boycotting Palm Springs because it’s surrounded by Riverside County would be like picketing the Episcopal Church—which has gone out of its way to welcome, affirm, and even consecrate gays—because its worship services reference the same Bible fundamentalist nut jobs thump in their crusades to condemn us. 

 

Besides, Palm Springs residents have perfected an über-laidback vibe that makes the rest of California seem practically uptight by comparison, and my need to decompress has achieved Trauma Level I in the days following the election. 

 

I’ve been taking the Prop. 8 vote hard—personally even. “It’s not a referendum on you,” le domestique has said more than once, but that hasn’t stopped me from losing sleep at night. The anxiety and dread I had felt for months before the election has evolved into a state of mourning, with the sheer indignity of having my rights put up for majority vote compounded by the cruel echo chamber of loss. Every morning since Election Day, my mind is struck on awakening by thoughts of Prop. 8—before I know whether it’s a workday or a weekend, before I remember anything interesting that might have happened the day prior, before it even occurs to me whether I need to get up and pee—and every morning I have to reprocess feelings of sadness and disbelief and anger all over again.

 

The few days immediately following the election were the worst, when I felt simultaneously numb and raw.  I don’t know if it’s possible to fully express to anyone who hasn’t experienced it directly what it’s like to finally feel like a first-class citizen in her own state after a lifetime of being held separate, only to lose that status five months later by a simple majority vote of her fellow citizens, citizens who were allowed to vote on the scope of my rights in a way that theirs have never been negotiable, citizens who considered the scope of gay rights on the same ballot and in the same manner that they considered the scope of the rights of farm animals, citizens who chose, in the end, to expand the rights of farm animals—passing an initiative to mandate larger cage sizes for egg-laying hens and other livestock by a statewide margin of more than 26 percentage points—even as they opted to diminish the rights of gays by a statewide margin of 4 points.

 

 

What saved my sanity most those first few post-election days was seeing the outpouring of emotion among my community—all that sadness and anger and passion and exhilaration that spontaneously hit the streets and came marching right past my office building the day after the vote, shutting down Wilshire Boulevard for hours; if the folks below look a little exhausted, it’s because this protest started at 2 o’clock that afternoon in front of the Los Angeles Mormon Temple, then morphed into a peaceful march around the city that lasted well past sunset.

 

 

Two and a half weeks later, I’m still waking to thoughts of Prop. 8 every goddamn morning, but while many of the same feelings of hurt and anger and loss are stirred, the emotions already feel partially processed, and it’s such a relief not to have to start from scratch each day.

 

My therapist and I have agreed that I’m going through a fairly typical mourning process, as though I’ve suffered a death of someone dear, and though I’m able to seek respite from my grief in sleep, or in brief moments of distraction, my consciousness is otherwise haunted by the constancy of this loss that seems to consume all the oxygen in the room. The good news, we’ve agreed, is that the mourning process eventually resolves and life returns to normal, and I see that happening for me—in fits and starts and by small degrees, with steps backward in between.

 

The evening before my birthday I sat in a perfectly heated Jacuzzi under billowing sheer canopies and a starlit desert night at our magical, intimate inn—and despite the beauty and comfort and peace I found myself surrounded by, my core was again weighted down by the constant sadness of these past two weeks.

 

“We got married!” le domestique said, trying to cheer me. “No one can take that away from us.”

 

“We haven’t even received our license in the mail yet; it could get annulled before we have it in hand,” I countered glumly.

 

“We got married, and nothing changes that,” she said firmly.

 

“Even if our marriage stands, so long as Prop. 8 is valid, don’t you think ours will always be a marriage with an asterisk?” I asked. “Like we’ll always have to explain it somehow: ‘Yeah, we got married during that five-month window in 2008.’ Don’t you think people will think of these as fake marriages, like the San Francisco couples in 2004?”

 

“No, we got married legally, and there isn’t anyone alive right now who won’t remember this time,” le domestique said.

 

The next day we went to Palm Springs City Hall to participate in the nationwide coordinated city hall demonstrations. (Sure, I went to a protest on my birthday, but after the demonstration we would return to the spa resort for scheduled massages—perhaps marking us as softies among the civilly disobedient.)

 

The mayor spoke, along with a number of city council members, ministers, organizers, and activists, including Harvey Milk campaign worker and AIDS Memorial Quilt founder Cleve Jones, whom I had the pleasure of meeting and thanking for his inspiration. Ahead of the curve as usual, Jones proposes that we focus our energies on the federal government, not individual states, to overturn all 30 of the existing constitutional marriage bans legislatively, and that we don’t stop there but insist that the incoming administration of Pres. Barack Obama together with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid act with appropriate speed to address LGBT inequities in military service, adoption, immigration, employment discrimination laws, hate-crime protections,  and access to social services. Visit Seven Weeks to Equality and read what he has to say—and sign the petition. I promise it’s worth the click.

 

 

Attending the demonstration lifted my spirits. (It was our second, after one the week prior in Anaheim, in another conservative hotbed, Orange County, my old stomping grounds. Though my battle cry was “Let’s storm Sleeping Beauty’s castle!” sadly, we got nowhere near Disneyland.) Later that night, instead of speaking only of innocuous things at the inn’s circular bar amid all the straight couples at happy hour, we chatted gamely with the innkeepers about the demonstration, Prop. 8, and the fate of our marriages. A couple who was celebrating their one-year wedding anniversary—and who the night before had asked a fellow straight couple of eight years for tips on staying together—overheard us talking to the innkeepers and remarked, “Wow, 14 years! Do you two have any tips for us?” It was a good moment.

 

The next morning we were sad to leave our little gay desert hideaway in the middle of “red” California, but we had jobs to get back to—not to mention those birthday presents.

 

On arriving home, le domestique retrieved the mail and sang out, “Hey, look what we got!” And there it was, an envelope from the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office of birth, death, and marriage records. Having neither celebrated a birth nor suffered a death—despite my grieving—this seemed indicative of a rare and precious thing. The envelope was unexpectedly hand-addressed, like a highly personal gesture of goodwill directly from the registrar-recorder. And inside was our certificate of marriage—with no obvious asterisk denoting the state of limbo in which we’ve felt so cruelly suspended—engraved with the Great Seal of the State of California.

 

 

I needed that reminder that, essentially, the state still had our back, because I’ve lately come to realize that in part what I’m mourning is the loss of California. I grew up here. This is my state, one that I’ve always felt proud to live in—perhaps insufferably so in the eyes of some of my friends. And while I was stressed and anxious about Prop. 8 having made it to the ballot, and while I fully realized that I should brace for the worst, in my heart I thought, Not here. Not in my fucking state.

 

Ours was the first state to pass a marriage-equality bill legislatively, in 2005, and the legislature passed yet another bill in 2007, after the first one was vetoed by our movie star governor, who reasoned, against the din of Republican angst over “activist judges,” that our rights were a matter best left to the courts. When our rights did come before the state supreme court, the justices made marriage equality the law of the land, which boded well for gays in the rest of the country—but also made our state’s constitution a national battleground—since it was the California supreme court that trailblazed the eventual overthrow of anti-miscegenation laws nationwide with its Perez v. Sharp decision in 1948, a full 19 years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, which found that the right to marry is a basic civil right and that the infringement of that right violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Sixty years later, the California court referred to the Perez case in its same-sex marriage ruling repeatedly and compellingly, only to see its ruling overturned five months later by “the will of the people.” 

 

 

On November 19, California’s supreme court justices announced that they had decided 6–1 to hear an appeal on the constitutionality of Proposition 8. We’re not disputing the result of the vote or trying to subvert the democratic process, as our opponents would have their unthinking followers believe; we’re contesting the validity of the proposition itself, asserting that it never should have made it to the ballot in the first place without prior approval of the legislature—a case we tried to get heard prior to the election. It is frightfully easy to mount a citizen-driven ballot initiative in California: It took just 1.1 million petition signatures to get it on the ballot—in a state with over 25 million registered voters—and it required a simple majority of 50% + 1 to pass. Good enough when one is deciding whether to increase the size of cages for egg-laying hens. Not so humane when asking an electorate to weigh in on the rights of a historically unpopular minority. Had the citizen-driven initiative process existed at the time of the Perez ruling, I’m quite certain that an anti–interracial marriage amendment would have been placed on the very next ballot and that it would have passed resoundingly, because in 1948, “the people” weren’t any more ready for a Mexican-American woman to marry an African-American man than they are ready in 2008 for me to marry the woman I love. 

 

Every U.S. citizen should be concerned about what the church lobby has been able to accomplish with voter-driven initiatives. Gays may bear the brunt of attacks from those who wish to legislate morality, but propositions aimed at curbing gay rights in Florida and Arkansas this election cycle also affected straights. Domestic-partnership benefits for couples of all sexual orientations were wiped out in Florida, forcing many senior citizens to choose between continuance of the pension and Social Security benefits they earned during their first marriage and basic relationship recognition, including hospital-visitation rights, with the partner they’ve found a new life with. And all unmarried couples, gay and straight, were barred from adopting or fostering children in Arkansas, which is pretty tough luck for the approximately 1,000 children currently languishing in orphanages and group homes in the state. Do you suppose the folks who voted to keep all those kids safe from sinfully cohabitating couples will now step up and take on an extra charge or two to make up the difference? 

 

 

It’s funny, in the days immediately following the election, I was worried about legal challenges by our side. I felt that the Yes on 8 crowd had gotten exactly what they wanted: a mandate from “the people” proving that they still weren’t ready to accept us as fully equal citizens; they could now point to Prop. 8, just as they’ve long pointed to Prop. 22, to say that “the people” want to enshrine heterosexual hegemony in California law. We could bring lawsuits, I thought, but we’ve already lost in the court of popular opinion, so could we ever really win our rights back in the near term?

 

My thinking has evolved since then, as I’ve reminded myself, as I’ve so often reminded those who tirelessly beat the “activist judges” drum, that it is among the court’s most sacred duties to protect persecuted minorities from the tyranny of the majority. I also reminded myself that 5,796,637 Californians—nearly 48% of the electorate—did vote against Prop. 8. Exit polls calculate that self-identifying lesbian, gay, and bisexual voters make up just 6% of the California electorate; that accounts for 727,162 of the no votes, assuming that all LGB voters affirmed their own right to marry. That leaves 5,069,475 self-identified heterosexual voters who joined our tiny minority and voted to protect our rights. Compare that to 2000, when only 2,909,370 voters—38.4%—said no to Prop. 22′s call for heterosexual dominion. Subtracting the 6% of the total number of Californians who voted on Prop. 22 whom we can assume were LGB—451,682—all from the con side, leaves us with 2,457,688 straight allies in 2000. It’s nice enough to think that we’ve moved the needle in our favor by nearly 20 percentage points, from a 23-point loss on Prop. 22 to a 4-point heartbreaker on Prop. 8, in eight years, but it’s astounding to confront the sheer number that represents: In 2000, 2.5 million straight Californians stood up for our equality; in 2008, 5 million did.     

 

And I have a message to those 52.2% of California voters who, when it came time to cast their vote, were too blinded by lies or homophobia or plain narrow-minded disgust to envision equality for their gay neighbor or coworker or cousin—because if you think you don’t know anyone gay at this point in your life, you’re just being willfully ignorant: You’ve stopped the marriages, for now. You’ve put us on notice that, the way you see it, our relationships aren’t like yours. But you’re on the wrong side of history, and one day not very long from now you’ll either lie about how you voted November 4, or you’ll scramble to justify your positions, digging yourself deeper and deeper into your unknowing, incurious, paranoid world as you trot out all the discredited arguments about the myriad ways you felt threatened by our simple plea to be treated with dignity and respect.

 

Or maybe you’ll just blame your vote on your preacher, because it’ll be easier to admit to blind allegiance than bald bigotry.

 

In the meantime, le domestique my wife and I are one of the 18,000 couples who got married between June 17 and November 4, and you may threaten my tenuous grip on first-class citizenship and seek to demean me in myriad ways. But the wind is at my back, and from what I’ve seen in these past couple of weeks, Prop. 8’s passage has done more to galvanize the forward momentum of gay rights than any event in my lifetime.

 

 

 

We’ll get same-sex marriage back in California, all right, but we might just get it back as a result of federal legislation overturning all 30 of these embarrassing, un-American, criminally offensive constitutional amendments. 

 

The final lines of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America seem particularly apt here: 

 

“The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.”

 

Sign hand-painted by the talented Treecup, who also officiated our wedding, because she’s full-service like that.

The following is a letter I wrote to my family, sent today, six days before a ballot initiative comes before California voters that has been described by the pro–marriage equality camp as “Gettysburg,” and by the anti–marriage equality folks as “Armageddon.” And the Hyperbole Award goes to…  

 

Dear Friends—

 

Well, e-mail may seem like a clumsy way to announce this, but Elizabeth and I got married. We had to act quickly to make sure we were legal ahead of the November 4 election—just in case Proposition 8 passes and closes the door on same-sex marriage—and we did so quietly because, after being together for 14 years, we already felt married.

 

But now I have to admit, actually being legally married does feel different.

 

In the absence of legal recognition, Elizabeth and I defined our relationship for years on our own terms. Then when California introduced a domestic-partnership registry in 1999, we went downtown and signed up for the handful of benefits it offered at the time. Over the years California legislators fought to expand our rights under that registry such that, by 2007, domestic partnership was practically identical to marriage—except in name. And that difference in name was a constant reminder that in the eyes of the state, our relationship fell under a category of recognition that held us separate from our relatives and so many of our friends.

 

Now that artificial separation is erased, and this joy I feel being married represents something far more profound than a shift in nomenclature: It’s the realization of true equality, and it’s been a long time coming!

 

I hope that you don’t mind my using the occasion of my marriage announcement to politick just a little bit, because these feelings could be very short-lived if Proposition 8 wins. Honestly, there’s never been an initiative on the California ballot more threatening to my ongoing rights and happiness. As a family member, you’ve always treated me as a first-class citizen, and I have every reason to think that you’re in favor of the state treating me likewise. Still, given that so many voters have reservations about same-sex marriage based on what the initiative’s supporters have been saying, I can’t let this election pass without addressing the topic directly with those who care most about me.

 

A few truths:

 

First, neither the California Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage nor Prop. 8 will have any effect on what is taught in schools. The state superintendent of public schools has himself appeared in television spots to assure voters that curriculum will not be affected in any way, and the California Teachers Association explains in a press release: “Proposition 8 will not affect teaching in our schools. That’s a lie crafted to scare people into voting for Proposition 8 and stripping Californians of rights they already have. Not one word in Prop. 8 mentions education, and no child can be forced, against the will of their parents, to be taught anything about health and family issues at school. California law prohibits it.”

 

Second, the marriage ruling has nothing to do with adoption laws. In California, same-sex couples are allowed to adopt children, and Prop. 8’s passage would have no effect on the state adoption code. The defeat of Prop. 8, however, would have a profound positive effect on the children of same-sex parents. Granting gay and lesbian couples the privileges and benefits of civil marriage, far from posing harm to families, affords the children of same-sex couples the same advantages and stable family structures that children of opposite-sex couples already enjoy. Approximately 60,000 children are currently being raised by same-sex parents in the state of California; it’s frankly impossible to reconcile sincere concern for the welfare of children and families with a concurrent rejection of this population’s needs for equivalent benefits and security.

 

Third, the Supreme Court ruling was not the work of “four activist judges.” Three of the four judges who voted to affirm same-sex marriage were appointed by Republican governors, and they weren’t creating “special rights” for gays and lesbians—they were recognizing the equal rights and protections already present in the California state constitution for all citizens. Prop. 8’s supporters say that such things should be decided by the people, not the courts, and in a perfect world, I would agree. Unfortunately, gays and lesbians are a tiny minority—about 6%, by latest estimates—and a historically unpopular one at that. The most sacred trust of the court is to protect the interests of minorities from an unsympathetic or unknowing majority, and this court took that tenet to heart. Sadly, Prop. 8 needs only a simple majority of 50% + 1 to reverse the court’s ruling and its protections for my community.

 

Fourth, marriage equality poses no threat to religious freedom in California. No church or minister of any sort can be compelled to marry anyone, gay or straight.

 

Lastly, a domestic partnership is not the same thing as a marriage. If it were, it wouldn’t need a different name.

 

If Prop. 8 passes, legal consensus says that my marriage to Elizabeth will likely stand, along with the 11,000 other same-sex marriages that have taken place since June 17 in what has been an incredible summer of love for same-sex couples, but our feeling of first-class citizenship would be diminished. Relegating gays and lesbians to a second class is what this constitutional amendment seeks to do, singling out a minority population and stripping them of civil rights that all other citizens enjoy.

 

Before 1998, when Alaska passed the nation’s first state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage by majority ballot vote, no constitution in the United States had ever been amended to rescind rights from a law-abiding segment of the population. It should have been impossible to do such a thing in America, but since then, 25 other states have passed similar constitutional amendments—largely through campaigns employing scare tactics that targeted gays and lesbians as a threat to American families and values—and this year, amendments are on ballots in Florida, Arizona, and California. I hope you’ll join me on Election Day in telling the rest of the nation that those kinds of scare tactics just won’t work here, and that that kind of discrimination is impossible in California.

 

Thank you for your love and support.

 

And please, if you feel that I deserve the same rights that you do, forward this e-mail to your friends—or, blog visitors, send a link! I feel strongly that people of all political and religious persuasions believe foremost in honesty, and however emotionally close to this issue I am, I think all will find that I’ve presented the facts plainly and truthfully.  

 

As I write this, I’m not in Hawaii or even in a Starbucks but in our home office, a room that shouts every bit of our house’s 1954 vintage with its dark-paneled walls and diamond-paned windows; we’ve paid homage to its build era with the odd Esther Williams movie lobby card and a framed oversized pullout RCA Victor magazine ad announcing the company’s latest line of 17 television sets, several of which are lovingly caressed by ladies in ball gowns. The view through those diamond-paned windows diverges sharply from 1954, when it was reportedly among the first few houses in our neighborhood, an area of the San Fernando Valley then dominated by apricot orchards. It now overlooks a well-traveled thoroughfare bisecting our thoroughly residential neighborhood, and on weekends I can often expect to watch a recent immigrant, perhaps undocumented, fixing his truck. I’m not crazy about car repairs taking place in my front yard, but I know whose side I’m on amid all the current anti-immigrant Republican hysteria, if only to differentiate myself from these folks:

Honk for spelling proficiency!

Let’s play an analogy game!

Recent immigrants are to many U.S. citizens…

as Eleutherodactylus coqui tree frogs are to many _____________.

If you answered “Hawaiians,” put a gold star on your forehead and proceed directly to the lightning round! And if you want to incur the wrath of same, stage a demonstration for “nonnative” species’ rights anywhere islanders gather.

Our first night on the Big Island we kept looking up into the trees trying to identify the bird emitting this relatively high-pitched but sweet co-qui call. The sound was everywhere, but there were curiously few birds in sight. When we tabled the issue the following morning at breakfast, our B&B hosts told us that the owners of the call were not birds at all but rather tree frogs:

The nonnative species has become a scourge across the island due to that tireless co-qui, used by boy frogs much as a male human would use Barry White records: to both repel other males and attract females. And like Barry, who “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe,” the little boy frogs court and impregnate the hyper-fertile ladies all the livelong year. (The males average a tiny 34 millimeters, while females reach an average of 41 millimeters, with the pronounced size difference attributed to the burden of all that reproductive energy expended by males.) So successful are the boy frogs at creating more frogs that their species, introduced accidentally to several Hawaiian islands in the mid 1990s via plant matter, has reached densities in some rain forests of approximately 8,000 specimens per acre. That’s about the same density the little devils have achieved in their native Puerto Rico, the difference being that in Puerto Rico they’re reportedly revered as a beloved native species and a symbol of territorial culture, much as Mexicans, all the rage reportedly in Mexico, are seen as encroachers in Los Angeles, especially when they’re not cleaning your toilets.

Mind you, some of the folks who disparagingly pronounced the coqui a nuisance nonnative species themselves arrived in Hawaii later than the frogs did—much as most “native” Angelenos’ families lazily trickled into California quite some time after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when the United States “bought” the Southwest from Mexico for $15 million and a psych! fingers-crossed promise to honor Mexican citizens’ preexisting property rights in the territories. Truly, the guy fixing his car in my yard may have a greater claim on my yard than I do—unless I play my Native American card.

If we could all just agree that the concepts of nativeness and citizenship are wack, we’d probably get along a lot better. But U.S. citizens are an I-me-mine lot, even if their families first immigrated to the United States in the 20th century, glossing entirely the part where their own tired, poor, huddled masses were disparaged as wretched refuse by preexisting 19th-century immigrants, who were in turn looked down on by 18th-century immigrants, who seemed like upstarts to Mayflower importees, of whom my own longest-standing North American forebears, the Peigan Blackfeet tribe, were understandably leery.

My Native American bloodline has since been diluted considerably by breeding with Swedes and Germans, but it’s that eighth-part Blackfoot blood that most captures my imagination, both because of the Ninawaki (“manly hearted woman”) tradition—aberrational tribal members identified by early European settlers as women who, contrary to the submissive Blackfeet feminine “ideal,” dressed and acted like their male counterparts, held tribal ranks, owned horses, told bawdy jokes, and sometimes engaged in warrior roles—and because, I suppose, if anti-immigrant assholes want to distinguish native versus nonnative species on a scale of centuries, I’ll gamely play that Native American card and ask them how many millennia their people have been here and suggest that maybe they should vacate my continent. Also, if the Blackfeet Nation ever exercises its sovereign right to establish large-scale gambling on its Montana reservation, I want a piece of my casino.

The Hawaiian Islands having been formed by volcanic activity, there aren’t really any native Hawaiian species, but by casual observation, the imposed cutoff for native versus nonnative species seems to be around 1950. If you landed or were brought to one or more of the islands before then, congratulations, you’re a Hawaiian species. If not, you’re a nuisance, especially if you make a lot of reproductive noise or mess with the ecosystem of a preexisting species. Take the nene—about which le domestique can tell you much more—a Hawaiian goose that serves as the official state bird (it is found in the wild exclusively on Maui, Kauai, and the Big Island). The nene (pronounced nay-nay) is a threatened species whose numbers declined to near extinction around 1952 thanks to hunters and other mean predators and maybe not the best survival instincts on the nenes’ own part. Through human interventions like captive breeding programs they have bounced back from a paltry 30 birds to between 500 and 3,000 today, but there’s a new recent immigrant in town to fuck with the nenes: the Kalij pheasant, a Himalayan breed disparagingly referred to as “those damn chickens” by many residents.

The Kalij pheasant arrived in 1962, a dozen years too late to be considered native, and thrived like a mofo such that by 1977 it was declared a legal game bird. In other words, “We’re lousy with these guys, so let’s shoot ’em”—an attitude not unlike that of self-appointed border vigilantes, who seemingly never got over their crushing disappointment at being rejected from any real job that would allow them to discharge a firearm in the line of duty. Thanks be to heaven that God recognized the need for the Second Amendment when he wrote our glorious Constitution; otherwise we might question the deep and patriotic need for random people to stockpile weapons at a ratio of 200 million firearms to 300 million Americans, and if we didn’t have all those guns, how would we ever feel secure?

One reason the Kalij pheasant is so successful on Hawaii is that it breeds quite competently in the wild [see also: coqui tree frogs]. Adding to its advantages, the Kalij is an omnivore [see also: humans], so while the nene is all finicky with its diet of leaves and berries, the Kalij krew is sucking down entire plants, from roots to buds, robbing the nenes of current and future crops in a single sitting.

I feel for the poor nenes (to say nothing of honest-to-god, born-here white guys), but should coqui tree frogs, those damn chickens, or even brown people really be faulted for thriving in a new environment? Adaptation is a handy skill that’s otherwise lauded by humans. As an invasive species to Hawaii myself, one of my first acts on arrival was to purchase a basic Hawaiian grammar book, both because I’m a big freakball and because I didn’t want to mangle the names of streets and people and seem too much like a tourist, though I’m guessing that any cred I attained in my prodigious ability to pronounce Queen Lili’uokalani’s name was blown as a result of my visit to the Mauna Loa macadamia nut factory:

Learning about the 12-letter alphabet, including all five vowels plus seven consonants, explained the paucity of hard sounds among all those mellifluous mingling vowels, and picking up some basic rules—like every syllable and every word must end in a vowel sound, no two consonants can occur without a vowel separating them, and the accent almost always falls on the penultimate syllable—helped me adapt to my new environment. Not that Hawaii has much of an adapt-or-die vibe, but failure to adapt can be so ugly. Consider the Bradys.

I wish I could tell you that I didn’t think even once about the three-episode Hawaiian vacation arc of The Brady Bunch while visiting the islands, but that would be a lie. I was reminded of it on our very first day, as we hiked the very first trail at Volcanoes National Park. The Bradys didn’t even go to the Big Island as far as I’m aware, but they trotted gamely alongside as we walked past the steam vents of Kilauea, as I undoubtedly drove le domestique to murderous thoughts by painstakingly describing every bit of trouble various family members encountered as a result of Bobby’s having picked up that infernal tiki idol.

That isn’t to say that my Brady memories weren’t corrupted. For instance, I remembered that Don Ho had made a guest appearance, but I misremembered that it had in fact been he who told Bobby the idol would bring an invasive species like himself nothing but heartache; now that I’ve refreshed my memory at the information gettin’ place called the Internet, I’m reminded that he was warned off the idol by those same random guys who told Greg about the big surfing contest that he should enter—because Greg had clearly and obviously become a championship surfer on the flight over.

Le domestique had to be reminded of these basic plot elements because she [claims she] has maybe never even seen the Bradys’ Hawaii triptych! She is, however, aware that the Bradys had run into similarly stressful situations on their Grand Canyon trip, which led us to speculate on a hike through a stunningly beautiful rain forest that the Bradys simply should not have traveled, because they never encountered such strife when they stuck to their own turf, which happens to be the very San Fernando Valley that we call home, which volleys up another issue: As SFV dwellers accustomed to our soft city life on a piece of land which, however licked lengthwise by the Pacific, is contiguously linked to a whole continent’s worth of infrastructure, are we not just as ill-equipped to meet Pele on her own terms? Le domestique picked up a tiki idol in the Honolulu airport; had she slipped it into her theoretical purse instead of setting it back down—after noting that it was made in China—would we have ended up like the Brady boys, hapless hostages of a late-career Vincent Price in his creepy cave lair?

Which brings us to the Thurston Lava Tube, the product of an approximately 500-year-old lava flow that could easily have served as the set for Price’s cool tiki cave hideout. It seems that as a lava flow cools, the outside can form a solid upper crust even as lava continues to flow through its insulated center, forming a tunnel. It’s kind of like a Twinkie, another potentially 500-year-old product, with its creamy goodness excised. Unlike the Thurston Lava Tube, no Twinkie has yet been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site—but fear not, the little sponge cake can’t be denied its due forever.

VNP has been kind enough to illuminate a section of the TLT that is fairly uniform in width and height such that the average invasive species can amble through it without a flashlight and get the subterranean vibe without need of much courage. But there is kindness also in letting nature stand for itself, and because Hawaii is cool like that, VNP has left a much longer section of the tunnel—a portion less regular in width, height, and depth—dark and craggy and separated from tourists only by a gate and sign warning of its undeveloped nature and the absolute necessity of self-provided light sources beyond that point. Again, I have to hand it to the country of Hawaii for warning tourists of potential pitfalls and then leaving it to us to decide whether we’d like to face the very slight odds that the awesomeness that lies just around the bend could claim a life, perhaps my own.

Happily, le domestique had packed a headlamp, so we surfaced to the rainforest exterior and made our way back to our rental car, then returned to descend its murky maw. As she who is inordinately fond of dark, drippy, and slightly dangerous places, I pronounced the undeveloped part of the TLT an early trip nominee for Coolest Place Ever!

Sharing a single headlamp posed its challenges, but we held hands. Tightly. Tighter still when I noted the similarity in sights and sounds to the very creepy horror flick The Descent, wherein a swell group of nonnative species of the gal variety go spelunking only to encounter subterranean cannibalistic humanoids way scarier than any late-career Vincent Price could ever be. They sound like giggling cockroaches and look like this:

Let’s play an analogy game!

The humanoids in The Descent are to the Sleestaks of Land of the Lost…

as the Thurston Lava Tube is to a ___________.

The dark side of TLT is the kind of place that makes a person feel brave and scared witless all at once—and maybe a little happier for the experience once it’s over, at which time I wanted to do it again. Not unlike riding a roller coaster backward, a terrifying proposition Magic Mountain (now Six Flags) used to occasionally offer up back in the day on its monster wooden coaster Colossus. I was never the bravest kid on the block, but the first rule of hanging out with boys is, Do as they do, and don’t cry about it. So I rode the damn roller coaster backward, never happier than when it finally pulled back into the station. Coming home from Hawaii hasn’t yielded that same sense of bewildered relief, but I know that if I overstayed my welcome there, the stigma of my invasive species status would eventually get me down. I had to return to my “native” soil, because unlike the coqui tree frog, I’m neither willing nor able to replicate myself 10,000-fold to claim my piece of the rain forest, especially when just a one-eighth share is enough to claim sovereign casino gambling rights. I’m waiting, my Blackfeet people.

Speaking of roller coasters, I apologize for any jarring segues, tangents, or abandoned roads you may have noted in the preceding text. My brain is currently laboring under the auspices of Her Royal Highness Mania, which bestows on my thought processes all the fluid melody of free jazz—and makes me think everything I’ve written is fucking brilliant! She’s a fun friend, until she’s not, at which time I may sheepishly delete this post and salt the cyberspace it once occupied.