TKM

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.

Sometimes we need our mates to point out the obvious, to challenge our sense of normalcy. Normalcy in this case being a slight blurriness of the world—about which I had been audibly rueful on more than one occasion—thanks to glasses whose prescription remained predictably static as my eyes merrily continued their maturation process.

Our vision degrades most noticeably during that first decade after we’ve been prescribed our first corrective lenses, or so I was told by an optometrist during those formative years, when my prescription seemed to turn on the whim of a fruit bat (a species which—non sequitur alert—was recently discovered to have a menstrual cycle similar to that of humans).

Once we get over that 10-year hump—as did I in my 20s—we expect to tuck into several decades of more-or-less stabilized impairment, changing glasses according to whims determined by nothing more than our own idiosyncratic sense of style.

I didn’t know I was about to fight this vision war on two fronts.

“I’m going to write you a prescription for separate single-vision reading and distance lenses or progressives,” said the 15-year-old optometrist who examined me.

“Progressives, like bifocals?”

“Yes, but because you have a reading-intensive job, you’ll want a wider field of vision in your reading glasses, so I recommend you keep them separate,” he said, avoiding the b word. “But like I said, I’ll write the prescription for either or.”

So this is how bifocals happen. No one sits you down in a quiet room to break the news, or presents them as an optional upgrade—“Tell me, Ms. Morrison, have you ever considered progressive lenses?” You just turn 40 and the next thing you know you’re at LensCrafters* weighing the merits of juggling two pairs of glasses versus the do-it-all wonder of bifocals, now euphemistically re-branded “progressives.”

(*Ordinarily I would balk at patronizing big-box vision over my friendly neighborhood optometrist, but I don’t live in a friendly neighborhood, and the last time I went to a local independent optometrist I disliked him and his entire staff more intensely than I would have preferred given how much money I was giving them. And even if le domestique hadn’t been the one to set up my appointment—after I approached her with my old glasses and pitifully asked whether she thought a broken piece might be successfully glued—I might have recalled that LensCrafters has a program wherein they repurpose old prescription glasses through clinics where some needy someone with a level of vision impairment remarkably similar to my own can walk away with my ex-glasses, which I suppose kind of makes us sight sisters, each with one not-so-bad eye and another eye that just doesn’t try very hard at all. Just imagine, someone in some dusty village in Mali could be walking around in my Oakleys, or those Giorgio Armani torties I wore in college, or even those ill-advised John Lennon glasses I bought back in my early 20s—apparently without looking at myself in the mirror first. I hope all the new owners of my old glasses get to look at themselves in the mirror first. Do Malians have a “geek chic” equivalency?)

Other than the bifocal thing, it had been a pretty routine exam—except when the tech insisted that I “guess” after I failed to pick up any more than two dimensions in the last couple of lines on a depth-perception test.

I blinked hard and opened my eyes wider, as if to let in more of the magic required to gauge depth, and scrutinized each line for its 3-D letter again. “Dunno,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis.

“Guess,” she repeated gleefully, like she was the keeper of some really awesome gossip she was dying to tell me.

“Can’t I guess ‘none’?” I asked. I really wasn’t trying to be difficult, but I didn’t want to randomize, because it seems to me that eye exams would have a sort of inverted guessing penalty. Like, SAT scoring assesses fractional point deductions for wrong answers, but here, correct guesses could result only in compromised vision assessment.

“Just guess,” she said doggedly.

“OK, I guess ‘none,’ ” I said firmly, because I’m no fun at all.

Later, five minutes into my post-exam shopping, the same woman walked up behind me and asked if I had found anything yet.

“No, I’m still looking.”

“I’ll help you,” she said gamely.

I didn’t want her to help me. At all. I had le domestique on hand for any necessary consultation. Besides which, the saleswoman/tech whose name I’ve forgotten clearly had taste dissimilar to my own. For starters, she wore a pink blouse, and also, she was recognizably female.

“Um, maybe give me some time to get an idea what I want first,” I said.

“If you tell me what you’re looking for, I can make suggestions,” she said, punctuating her eagerness with a little bounce on the last word.

If you get any pushier, I thought, I may make some suggestions of my own.

I glanced around the store to confirm my suspicion that other shoppers were being allowed to go it alone. Maybe pink blouse thought she could mentor me and save me from my own worst instincts. Surely she doesn’t look that way on purpose, pink blouse may have thought, filled with a sense of altruistic purpose. I will help her look like the female of her species.

Employing a language of certainty, I managed to shoo her away, but only for a little bit. I’m a very slow shopper, and anyone who thinks I can make a decision about something I have to wear every day—on my face—in a period briefer than, say, the menstrual phase of a fruit bat (24 hours) doesn’t know me at all. Even if my brain’s processing speed weren’t impaired, my decision-making capacity and I divorced ages ago. (Typical sad story: It wanted a level of trust I just couldn’t give it, so it ended up shacking up with some teenage boy who, it bragged petulantly, never questioned it, ever. Last I heard they were doing 20-to-life in the federal pen.)

Pink blouse was back. “Have you found anything?”

I know when I’m beat. I retrieved all the frames I had liked and put them in the little velvet-lined staging area she was holding. If it’s possible to grant someone else some small happiness at no cost to oneself, one really should.

But there was a cost, because now, based on the frames I had chosen, pink blouse thought she had a bead on my baseline taste and commenced her mentorship by showing me frames that, to her, resembled what I had chosen but had a little more of the something she thought I should want, like maybe rhinestones.

I’m not a fashion-forward girl. In fact, I find some fashion so disagreeable it’s viscerally upsetting. For instance, it makes me angry that the very worst fashion instincts of my mid-’80s high-school era are galumphing attitudinously down the catwalk in 2007:

Ill-fitting high-waisted (called “paper-bag waist” in the industry) jeans? Et tu, Diesel?

Because my fashion sense shoots blanks, I generally jones in one of two frame directions: rimless, or something evolved from your standard-issue GI horn-rims. (I can’t wear contacts, as I found out when I was going through the hiring process for the LAPD—yeah, I know, more about that another time—which requires contacts instead of glasses for officers who need vision correction. I got insane levels of calcium deposits no matter how diligent I was about cleaning my lenses, and my optometrist said that just happened with some people. I imagine that for the right contact-intolerant candidate, the department might have granted special dispensation to wear glasses, but we never got to that bridge—my psych evaluation required disclosure of my mental health treatment history, making whether or not I could wear contacts utterly moot.)

Pink blouse was having none of my standard-issue nonsense, as she tirelessly brought me frames that I pronounced too shiny, too flashy, too glossy, too trendy, too sparkly, too clubby, too colorful, too Dolce&Gabbana, etc. She cajoled me into putting some of them on, for her, but I drew the line when she approached me with frames that had a sort of pink undertone.

“They’re pink,” I said.

“They’re not pink.”

“They’re pink enough,” I repeated, assuming the crossed-arm stance of a child refusing cough syrup.

“Just try them. I want to see them on you,” she said.

I shook my head and turned away from her. We’d crossed some weird line now, like I was shopping for school clothes with my mom circa 1974. Why can’t I pick out my own frames like all the other kids?

Once we had settled on five frames, one of which she had picked out—yeah, I threw her a bone—I sat down at one of the fitting stations and began assessing them in a more concerted way. I eventually narrowed my choices to three, and hers didn’t make the cut. It came down to a rimless frame, a horn-rim-esque frame, and these racy frames in a frost-gray color:

The Ray-Bans were pretty flash for the likes of me, but I really liked them. I especially liked them on the shelf, and I tried like hell to like them on my face. I put them on, I took them off, I put them on, I took them off, I put the horn-rims on and took those off and really quickly replaced them with the Ray-Bans, like if I could do that fast enough, then maybe I could effect a side-by-side comparison with myself. Le domestique weighed in; she liked the horn-rims best. Pink blouse weighed in; she liked the ones she had picked out that I had already eliminated best. Then pink blouse shopped me around to her coworkers, and I put on and took off all the frames for them too, imagining as I did so that to a person they were thinking, Well, sweetie, they’d all look better if you grew some hair.

As you might guess, I rejected the Ray-Bans in the end. I know they weren’t actually all that flashy, but they were just flash enough that when I put them on I couldn’t get past the idea of a 40-year-old who had just been prescribed bifocals making a lame play at fashion relevance. Like maybe I should just go get some paper-bag waist jeans to go with them.

Instead, I embraced my age, though I took the optometrist’s advice to get separate reading and distance glasses—and not just to avoid the idea of bifocals; I understand that I’m still fighting a two-front war—so once I narrowed my frames to two, the only choice that remained was which prescription to put in each. That was pretty easy, since I was really the only one who particularly liked the rimless pair; they would be my reading glasses, leaving the frames with three-way approval (with the caveat that pink blouse still liked the ones she had picked out best and was only on board with this second choice as a conscientious objector) as my all-the-livelong-day glasses. These are they:

But wait, there’s a denouement.

The standard-issue pair was ready the same day, that being the whole LensCrafters about-an-hour shtick, but rimless glasses take longer—about a week. So I reported to the store the following Saturday—wearing my other new glasses, naturally—to pick up the not bifocals. I gave the optician my name and sat at the fitting table. When she presented them to me, I took off my glasses and replaced them with the new pair, causing her to gasp theatrically.

“Oh, my God, those are so much better on you!” she said with a big sunny smile on her face. “They’re like night and day!”

I looked silently back at her, wondering whether she would dig this hole deeper or go ahead and knock off for the day.

“Your old glasses, I don’t know, they just didn’t suit your face, but these were a great choice,” she shoveled.

I waited another beat before I said, “Actually, these are just my reading glasses. The other ones are my primary glasses; I got them here last week.”

A blank expression flickered ever so briefly across her face before she rebounded. “Oh, well, they’re both great,” she said, then bid me, “Put the others back on.”

I did, and she said, “Yeah, you made two really great choices.” Then we proceeded to my fitting, over which there was some disagreement as to whether the glasses were sitting crooked (my assertion) or my face was itself crooked (her assertion). Rather than argue against the latter, I proposed that an adjustment be made regardless, making the glasses either rest even on what I thought was my properly balanced face, or align with rather than against this newly reported asymmetry. She made the adjustment, but she also made it clear that this was one of those customer-is-always-right gestures, which she might rephrase as “The customer is always right inasmuch as I’ll do any stupid thing they ask so long as they understand that they’re actually wrong.”

A few weeks ago le domestique complained on her blog about our Select Comfort bed, and much to our surprise a real-live Select Comfort customer service representative read her post and attempted to address the problem. So it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility that LensCrafters representatives are currently standing by and—beyond marveling at my copy editor’s fastidious attention to the styling of their company name: solid, with an internal initial cap—wondering how my already great shopping experience might have been even better! So here are some takeaway lessons:

1. Don’t make clients “guess” when they and their eyes reach an impasse during the exam.
2. Don’t stalk clients as they shop.
3. Trust that the client probably thinks about her personal aesthetic more than you think she does, and that she means with all her heart to look like that.
4. Never insist that a client try on frames she doesn’t like, not even for you.
5. Don’t grimace when a client tries on a frame she has picked out—unless the client grimaces first.
6. If the client grimaces when she tries on a frame you picked out, don’t try to coax her out of her unfortunate fashion retardation. No means no.
7. If the client makes a blanket assertion that she does not like, say, pink or rhinestones, assume that she won’t like anything you bring her in the pink or bejeweled family. If the client says she doesn’t want anything “too Dolce&Gabbana,” assume that this includes, among others, frames actually branded Dolce&Gabbana.
8. If you think the client is being a poopyhead about all your great suggestions, see rule 2.
9. Never insult a client’s old glasses—even if you think the new ones are ten thousand times better—not just because they might not be such old glasses but because regardless of how old they are, she picked them out at some point, liked them at some point, and has likely been wearing them—in public!—for a considerable length of time. She doesn’t so much want to hear how lame they were.
10. Even if the customer isn’t always right, pretend that she is right about the symmetry of her features. Arguing with her about whether her face is crooked benefits no one.
11. I cannot emphasize this enough: Disclose the price of the lenses the first time a client asks, and when she says she doesn’t need scratch-resistance, glare protection, or any other treatment jacking up the price of her lenses, don’t insist that the optometrist prescribed the upgrades. Doctors do not prescribe scratch-resistance.

Other than that, everything was great.

——————————————————–

Update: As alluded to in rule 11, pink blouse tried to up-sell me numerous unnecessary lens treatments without disclosure. Her initial quote included a charge of $300 for the lenses alone, with no description as to what that included. When I said that price was absurd, she sort of shrugged her shoulders like a bored teenager. It wasn’t until I insisted on being shown a schedule of charges that I discovered her quote had included not only an upgraded lens material that I hadn’t asked for but numerous special treatments, none of which would have been covered by my insurance. I then specifically said I wanted absolutely basic plastic lenses—the kind my insurance would pay for—at which time pink blouse presented me with a LensCrafters price schedule listing basic plastic lenses at $120.

On February 7 I received a document from my insurance provider explaining what was covered and what wasn’t and noticed a line item for “scratch protection coating” (a treatment I had specifically declined), charged at $20, of which I paid $15. The lenses themselves—the absolutely basic plastic kind I asked for, the ones that are covered by my insurance provider—were listed at $100. Nice, LensCrafters. Enjoy that extra $15 you weaseled out of me, because your ethically challenged business practices guaranteed I’ll never come back.

Now, what was the name of that review site I ran across the other day? Oh, right, PissedConsumer.com. Must go there now.

You know that urban legend that says if you’re out for a pleasant night drive and you see a car with its lights off, DON’T FLASH YOUR BRIGHTS AT THE CAR, because, the legend goes, it could be a gang initiation wherein thugs drive around in the noir until they encounter a driver courteous enough to signal them, at which time THEY WILL KILL YOU DEAD!

The frequency with which that cautionary tale is circulated and cited as fact speaks volumes about the American psyche: Think twice about drawing attention to yourself among strangers, however friendly your intentions, because you may be singling yourself out for attack!

Well, I flashed my brights at the Episcopal Church via a December 19 Advocate.com commentary praising the gay- and lesbian-inclusive platform its leaders and members have embraced over the last several decades, a movement that reached a boiling point with the 2003 consecration of V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay and actively partnered priest, as bishop of New Hampshire. The church has since been wracked by conflict both internal—several dozen conservative U.S. congregations and one entire diocese have left the national body in protest—and external, with the worldwide body to which the church belongs, the Anglican Communion, threatening in fits and starts to cut the whole darn U.S. province adrift. Much more detail can be read in the essay itself, should you be so inclined.

Mine was meant as a friendly flick of the brights, a little shout-out to the church’s presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who has held the progressive line despite enormous pressure to back down, and its beleaguered members, the majority of whom favor an inclusive church even if such a platform visits uncertainty and strife on their denomination. In recognizing and praising the national church’s vanguard position, of course, I noted its fallout, including the recent secession of that aforementioned diocese (in my own home state of California, no less), an unprecedented event within the church that underlines the recalcitrant position of Anglican traditionalists, many of whom habitually drive about with darkened headlights and a frank willingness to lash out at those who threaten to illuminate the world beyond their frosted windshield.

Given the Advocate.com audience, I anticipated a largely LGBT readership, thus vastly underestimating the Internet’s powers of dissemination. Remarking on the commentary’s Web traffic the day after it was posted, our digital media director said that the piece was logging the kind of numbers we typically see only on breaking news of, say, homophobic Republican senators caught in flagrante delicto with gents in public toilets. And you can’t just make that shit up; we have to wait—sometimes months between occurrences—for such gifts from the news gods.

Happily, most of my traffic was of a friendly persuasion. Plenty of nice Episcopalians, both gay and straight, clicked through from links on progressive blogs; several even took time to drop me an e-mail noting how gratifying it was to see a story acknowledging a straight Christian voice in matters of LGBT social justice. But links to my commentary inevitably also landed in a couple of inhospitable Web neighborhoods, the kind of places where we dykes and faggots had best drive through quickly if at all, lest the thuggish local holy men shoot out our headlights and smite us under cloak of darkness.

When my commentary came to the attention of members at a certain conservative Anglican blog, I was subject to much disliking. (I’m given to understand, courtesy of the aforementioned conservative Anglicans, that gay and lesbian folks overuse the word hate because, in truth, we relish victimhood. So chastised, I won’t be throwing that word around here, nope, not even when speaking of the only emotion I can think of that could possibly inspire random heterosexuals to spend such significant amounts of their limited time on this earth contemplating and communicating the kind of vitriolic hate not-liking speech that springs from the mouths of homo haters dislikers—other than that stultifying fear among certain types of their own inclination toward the love that dare not speak its name.)

What surprised me about the response among conservatives was the personal chord struck by their hatred disliking. Of course I knew when I published the piece that at least a few traditionalists would see it, and of course I knew they would like it not one bit; the commentary lionizes those very stances of the Episcopal Church that make its detractors go absolutely nuclear. But I think I did a fairish job of presenting the facts as well as my opinions without resorting to personal attacks, so I suppose I expected an in-kind response. If any. I mean, really, who the hell am I that those concerned with the serious work of calibrating the nation’s moral compass should waste energy shouting me down?

It took just four comments at the aforementioned blog for its readers to regress from parsing my text to parsing my appearance. From there, nearly half of the 31 comments to the link were concerned with, first, whether I was a boy or a girl, and second—after they deftly worked out that my first name, Teresa, and my self-identification as a lesbian indicated girlness—how much I didn’t look like a girl. Friends, I have met the enemy, and it attends junior high school.

The emphasis on my appearance seemed especially odd since I didn’t say one word about what John-David Schofield, the bishop who led the secession movement in central California, looks like:

But why go to town on a man’s appearance when there’s so much to say about his actions? Namely, that he has betrayed the will of his own denomination by refusing ordination to women, railing against gay and lesbian inclusion in the church, and operating an “ex-gay” ministry through his cathedral—naturally, he is himself a closeted homo (another factoid I didn’t mention in the commentary), having gone on record as an “ex-gay” years ago in an interview his followers now deny exists. But really, isn’t it more of a surprise these days when a virulently antigay leader isn’t a great big closet case?

Regardless of whether parishioners in crystal cathedrals ought to throw stones, they did so with delight—during a week in which I hope they also found time to celebrate the birth of their lord and savior. At one point the discussion addressed the likelihood that my appearance and orientation indicated a history of sexual abuse, an incredibly popular trope among the religious right—Google “childhood sexual abuse” and “lesbian” and your top hits will be “studies” conducted by fundamentalist organizations showing that a lesbian orientation is practically a gift with purchase of molestation. Was the poster asking the others to lay off discussing my appearance in deference to that probability, or was he gamely making sport of sexual abuse survivors? I’m honestly not sure, but I’m certain that the only time it’s appropriate for a stranger to bring up the possibility of my or anyone else’s sexual abuse history is never.

I responded by flicking my brights again, helpfully providing the Anglican blog community with a link to my earlier essay about gender, seeing as how they were so very interested in sussing out mine. Then a funny thing happened: The comments sort of petered out. Oh, sure, there was the peanut gallery member who countered with a link to an article about female aggression and lack of maternal behavior among spotted hyenas, appearing to suggest that, like the hyenas, women like me might be successfully treated with anti-androgen drugs to curb our masculine aggression (omigod, if they only knew how not aggressive I am) and cultivate feminine behaviors. A second poster brought up another popular conservative trope: that they don’t so much hate dislike homos, they just don’t understand why we always have to run around flaunting our relationships.

I know, right? It’s nearly impossible to go to mainstream movies or read popular books without being subjected to same-sex love story after same-sex love story. We lucky homosexuals grow up in environments where our sexuality is constantly reinforced as the norm.

To add homosexual insult to heterosexual injury, a person can’t go anywhere without seeing us engaged in acts of explicit physical affection!

If only we homos could just step back for a moment, we might recognize that ours isn’t the only valid kind of relationship.

Hey, your god just called. He hates dislikes disingenuousness.

Despite the aforementioned couple of stragglers, about 15 minutes after I announced my presence at the hateful dislikeful blog, the theretofore spirited commentary on my androgen-laden hyena-like ways ceased. Were the sanctimonious creeps turned off by the idea that their words didn’t appear to hurt me? Were they legitimately embarrassed to discover that I was privy to their ugliness? Or were they simply not interested in having an actual conversation with participation not strictly limited to those who completely agree with them?

Among many brilliant things le domestique has been heard to say, one of my favorites is, “The Internet slices people too thin.” Whatever personal inclination we want to feed—liberal or conservative, gay or straight, secular or religious, cat or dog, Mac or PC—there are scores of blogs and discussion boards online where we can get precisely the information and resonance we think we need. Such a sense of belonging is truly wonderful. But as the ease and abundance of access draws communities of common interest closer together, it pushes camps who disagree ever further apart, because increasingly, if we don’t want to, we don’t ever have to talk to anyone we don’t already completely agree with. It doesn’t bode well for the promotion of an open society. (For an accounting of 21st-century regressions of liberties and attitudes in the United States, read Naomi Wolf’s essay “Ten Steps to Close Down an Open Society” at the Huffington Post. It’s a chilling reminder of how far we’ve strayed from what most people think of as incontrovertible U.S. ideals.)

My flirtation with the Episcopal Church had consequences both expected and unexpected. While I have made much of the negative reactions by traditionalists, the positive response was tenfold the negative. Never has my writing been so profoundly rewarded as by the gratification and fellowship I’ve felt with Episcopalian readers these last couple of weeks. Confronting that same firewall of depersonalization their conservative counterparts sought so lamely to penetrate, many progressive Christians simply flicked their brights back at me to acknowledge that my gesture was well-received. Those who pulled over to invite me to their churches did so not to pressure or proselytize but to let me know that their doors would always be open.

To clarify, I have not had a religious epiphany. Nor can you expect me anytime soon to gift you with a New Testament—or even an Amy Grant album. This secular humanist doesn’t expect to undergo a faith makeover in the foreseeable future. But I have experienced a shift in my attitude toward Christianity. After a decade of static from the religious right, I had developed a bone-splintering knee-jerk reaction to the ecclesiastically inclined. I didn’t cultivate it, but I didn’t deny it oxygen either—like most people I seek online resources and news stories that reinforce my worldview, and, well, being an atheist sometimes makes me feel like a freak, like I’m missing something that everyone else sees, and feeling like a freak can make a person a little defensive, especially when religious organizations are actively distributing free bumper stickers condemning my right to equality.

Like the conservative Anglicans I encountered, I too had become a bit blinkered to the idea that a monolithic concept—in my case Christianity, in theirs homosexuality—is best viewed in full light of the individuals who give it life. I’ve since been reminded that for every Christian who dims his headlights to get a bead on his enemy, there are many more who understand that true humanitarianism is contingent on communication with people outside one’s immediate faith and social circles. In this age of increasing polarity I’m grateful that such people exist at all, and even more grateful that so many of them flicked their brights back at me to signal that my message was well met—and perhaps also to let me know that those shadowy thugs in the next car, for all the dire warnings we’ve heard of their quick and powerful wrath, are only threatening if we give credence to their legends and thus snuff our own lights.

“Stop Googling yourself!” le domestique commanded when I told her the two-faced kitten had died.

How could she know that having become Googlable represented for me the realization of a hastily conceived eleventh-hour backup dream? Indeed, how could she even understand the singular thrill of finding herself online when she can’t even effectively Google herself, her full name being far more common than mine and therefore returning more hits—72,800 in a quoted search—than are worth sifting through for the little nuggets of self-referential celebration contained therein.

“Teresa Morrison” isn’t such a rare name, of course, returning 1,590 hits of its own, and in searches past I’ve had to sift through my own share of more notable women who share my name—Teresa Morrison the bog turtle expert; Teresa Morrison the Nova Scotian soccer midfielder who, along with her identical twin, plays in a Canadian national women’s league; Teresa Morrison the racing yacht skipper; Teresa Morrison the second-grade teacher whose class collected 1 million buttons for a history project—to find even a single genuine reference to Teresa Morrison the copy editor—that would be me—as listed on the online masthead of The Advocate. Listen, I’m pleased as punch to work on the magazine, but finding myself on its masthead online isn’t as thrilling as all that; I know that I work there, and even what I do, and I can see my name on the masthead in real paper issues any old time.

Then again, I’m not sure the Teresa Morrison in Lake City, Fla., who grabbed headlines in March 2005 as the owner of a cat who gave birth to a kitten with two faces—two sets of eyes, two noses, and two mouths that mewed in unison, side by each like a little domesticated Janus—was herself all that thrilled with her peculiar status on the World Wide Web.

The two-faced kitten TM has long been the most prolific source of hits for all us Teresa Morrisons. So many were the mentions of her mother cat’s queer little anomaly—the first such birth on record—that like a tree lost amid a forest, the follow-up story reporting that the kitten had died just two days later had completely eluded me in my past searches. So it was with some sadness that I recently passed that news along to le domestique, prompting the suggestion from her that I was perhaps spending too much time searching for myself online.

All this self-Googling started a couple of weeks ago, when I noticed a precipitous spike in hits to my blog, including a wealth of click-throughs from a piece I had written for Advocate.com, “The People vs. Loving,” on California’s Assembly Bill 43, which but for its veto by Governor Terminator would have removed references to gender in the state’s marriage laws, clearing the way for same-sex couples to wed—and clearing the way also, by dint of an exceedingly slippery slope prophesied by the collective lurid imagination of the religious right, for polygamy, incest, bestiality, rampant public sex, the death of the American family, and the crucifixion of all that is holy and good.

Even Belgian dogs reject our advances.

The curious thing about this spike was that it came weeks after the commentary had been posted, and therefore weeks since it had been at all prominent on Advocate.com’s splash page. So I Googled the title of the commentary and solved my little mystery quicker than you can say “Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective.”

An article on the subject at The Washington Post’s Web site had linked to my AB 43 commentary, along with other recommended related reading. Let me say that again. A newspaper that is regarded among the top half dozen or so papers in the nation—that little rag that broke Watergate—pointed to my silly old commentary on an LGBT news site that likely sees 1/100th the traffic commanded by its own online maw. And some of the readers who followed the link and read the Advocate piece came, in turn, to my silly old blog!

Good golly, if The Post is tapping my genius, can The New York Times be far behind?

Yes, it turns out, it can be, as I have yet to find evidence of any notice of ME by the newspaper of record. I have found one other news site link, this one from a blog at the Spokane, Wash., Spokesman-Review pointing toward my latest piece, “Boy, Interrupted,” a commentary on our societal gender baggage as seen through the lens of LGBT infighting over the scope of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

That piece also prompted a number of links from sites that aggregate transgender and gender politics news, which is kind of cool considering that I feared just the opposite might happen: that transgender rights folks who read the piece might say, “Who the hell are you to speak out about gender issues?”

For the record, I’m just another voice in the wilderness. And thank you for not yelling at me.

My online proliferation—proliferation being defined here as anything less than complete anonymity—comes not a moment too soon, as I can practically feel the heat of 40 candles lighting up a trans-fat-free birthday cake even as I write this. Depending on whom you trust—me, or the federal government—I entered the world four decades ago tomorrow, or maybe yesterday.

Am I the only person with a Social Security birthday that differs from her actual birthday? I didn’t realize this until several years ago, the first time I tried to file my income tax return electronically. My return was rejected because the birthday I entered differed from my birthday of record, which was apparently entered as November 13, not November 15, at the time my Social Security number was issued. This was news to me, so I naturally called my mother, who had filled out the application for my SSN when I was still in grade school. After I explained the confusion, she expressed a moment of doubt (!) and suggested I check my birth certificate. I did, and it confirmed the date I’ve always celebrated: November 15.

For simplicity’s sake, I changed the date on that year’s tax return to November 13, thinking I would iron it out later, but in years since I’ve been both (a) too lazy and (b) too disinterested to go wait in line at the Social Security office to disabuse the feds of the notion that my birthday is any day but what I say it is. Besides which, when it comes to the Federal Bureau of Misinformation and Wrong-Headed Opinions About Me, date of birth is very low on my list of correction priorities.

So if you think our government is never wrong, my birthday was yesterday and you totally missed it. Otherwise it’s tomorrow.

Whenever you personally celebrate my birthday, I will this week enter my 40s, which is high season for a midlife crisis reflection as to who we are, what we stand for, and how life thus far stacks up against our lifelong goals and dreams. I could overcomplicate this, but for once I won’t:

Failure: I haven’t published a book.
Accomplishment: I haven’t killed myself.

The latter is an ongoing goal that can’t technically be called an “accomplishment” until my death is achieved via any non-self-inflicted means, but I feel confident in declaring victory on that front because I now know of a place I can go where condescending but well-meaning people will keep me away from the knife drawer and ration my pills in little paper cups.

On the other hand, the former goal can’t truly be labeled a “failure” just yet. In life’s marathon, I’m only at mile marker 13, maybe 14 (if you have reason to believe this is an erroneous assumption, please notify me immediately). I still have time to write my masterpiece minor-key memoir, and even if I never publish a book, that goal seems more mutable to me now than it did when I was 12 and first conceived it. In 1979, the World Wide Web was more than a decade from fruition. There was no way for me to conceive then of a future network through which I could pass school notes on a grand scale, reaching 10s, even scores of readers, many of whom aren’t even in my homeroom! Had I known that, would I still have dreamed of one day publishing something as tiredly old-school as a book—an object of heft in the hand, one with pages, whether rough or smooth, that propel the reader through setup, conflict, and, with any luck, a satisfying resolution, after which we may close its covers with some small ceremony, taking a moment to reflect on the just-completed journey, perhaps reading or rereading the author’s bio and gazing at his or her jacket photo with simultaneous deep admiration and slight jealousy?

OK, I might yet be suckling at the teat of that dream. But had I known at 12 what wonders lay just over the Commodore 64 horizon, surely I would have conceived a backup dream of one day being Googlable. And had I been so prescient, that backup dream would seem nigh on the eve of my 40th birthday!

I’ve been inching up the Google chain these past few weeks, and have made significant progress even in the last few days. During a search this weekend, my earliest Google hit was at number 25, with subsequent citations at odd intervals. But a search just conducted in the moment before I wrote this sentence yielded my first hit at number nine! I have entered the Teresa Morrison top 10! High-five me, bog turtle expert, even if my second mention slips all the way to number 61 (!), after which many of me can be found hanging with my homegirls in the 80s and 90s.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it, watching the notoriety of non-famous people—and even famous bog turtle experts—rise and fall like stock market shares?

The Teresa Morrison with the two-faced kitten, once so dominant on the Googlescape, has now fallen behind me. She’s also lost ground to folk musician Teresa Morrison of the duo Up River, available for weddings and your more Celtic-themed bar mitzvahs; New York chanteuse Teresa Morrison, who can be seen and heard on YouTube singing “Easy As Life” from Aida to a noisy-to-the-point-of-rude lounge audience; and, of course, Nova Scotian identical twin soccer stud Teresa Morrison.

And don’t count out that second tier of Teresa Morrisons—the group with whom I identify most strongly, even if I’ve temporarily slipped toward the head of the pack. Many of us are making our case for first-page status even as you read this. There’s the Teresa Morrison of Kitchener, Canada, who in a formal complaint to her district laments that excessive truck noise and traffic on her residential street limits the time she spends in her garden and her outdoor enjoyment of her property. There’s the Teresa who owns the Morrison Inn and Holiday Bar in Morrison, Colo., whose 450 residents fancy theirs “the most haunted town in America, per capita.” There’s the Teresa Morrison of Nassau County, N.Y., who, as a losing candidate for the Farmingdale Village Board of Trustees, campaigned on a platform that pleaded “for people to be happy to live here and for the bickering to stop,” a sentiment I think we can all get behind. There’s the Teresa Morrison who as a lab tech at the University of Georgia School of Veterinary Medicine founded a now-20-year-old pet visitation program for homebound seniors.

In the end, though, I think there may be one way in which I’ve affected the Google fame of every Teresa Morrison out there, and I’m not sure how they’re going to feel about it. Due to the nature of my appearances and citations on LGBT-oriented sites, our name has become a keyword that will generate hits on bottom-feeder porn sites, whose little spiders go out Web crawling and collect captive phrases resulting in nonsensical hits like this one, which, if clicked, will make your monitor erupt as a pornographic house of mirrors with new windows opening faster than you can shut them:

Gay Squirts: Most actual news about hunk fucking and gay surfing; civil unions; gay-friendly; Teresa Morrison!

Or, even better:

Gay Canadians: Best Gay of Mexican hunk information source! By Teresa Morrison

At last, I’ve achieved gay porn search term status! And to all those other Teresa Morrisons who never did nothin’ gay to nobody, “You’re welcome!”

With my backup dream accomplished, and my not-killing-myself goal making steady progress, I can put foolish dreams and cares aside and turn 40 without a worry in the world as to what this second act may yield. With one eye focused bravely on the future, and one lazy walleye retrospectively surveying the detritus strewn about my beaten path, I will move through life with the courage and the pride of a woman who has no need of worldly huzzahs.

Life, I am told, begins at 40. Well, all I’ve got to say is that that’s one fucking lame time for life to start, given all the preamble and muck we have to go through to get there. But seeing as how I’ve arrived and all, bring on the dancing ponies. I’m ready for the good bits.

We’re having butter issues, le domestique and I.

Actually, we’re having buttery spread issues—butter originating in the udder is untouched by the controversy.

It’s sad, really. We thought we had found a buttery spread with which we could form a lifelong bond, but our BBF betrayed us—or, rather, never had our back at all. Land O’Lakes® Light Butter with Canola Oil, a product chosen for its low fat content, rich flavor, and lack of hydrogenated oils, served us in any number of ways for a year or more. We had switched to LO’L from Brummel & Brown®, a yogurt-based spread previously chosen for its low fat content, rich flavor, and agreeable spreadability factor. (For the record, LO’L was a little too spreadable. Straight out of the fridge it was ready to melt invitingly on to—or even molecularly merge with—your toast, your pancakes, what have you. But if you happened to take it out of the fridge too early, like, more than 30 seconds before you absolutely needed to, it assumed its preferred liquid form. That’s what one gets, I suppose, for asking too much of her buttery spread.)

We had turned our backs on B&B—the discovery of which, its product Web site promises, is “like when you discovered that laughing was also a full-body workout”—only because its “vegetable oil blend” (B&B is advertised as 10% yogurt and 35% vegetable oil, leaving the product potentially, by my calculation, 55% puppy blood) contains partially hydrogenated soybean oil—hydrogenation being what puts the trans in trans fat.

I’m not typically a dietary alarmist, but when I heard an NPR story some time ago calling hydrogenated oil “plastic fat,” as in, that’s how it reacts with your biology, those long-dormant alarm bells sounded. My larder is quite full enough, thank you, without ingesting something predisposed to settling into a cozy pocket of my stomach for a years-long nap. Even our corporate-friendly government, by way of the Food and Drug Administration, has declared that when it comes to trans fat, the only healthy dietary intake is no dietary intake.

I labored over my choices. Have you had to choose a new buttery spread lately? The variety is astounding, but while all promise “rich, buttery” flavor, very few lack hydrogenated oils (almost all claim 0% trans fat, but because of business-friendly consumer-hostile FDA labeling standards, those products can still contain significant amounts of the stuff; the only way to figure out whether your butter products contain hydrogenated oils is to stand interminably before your grocer’s dairy case inspecting labels).

After reading the nutritional information on a number of promising products, I settled on the aforementioned LO’L spread, one of only a handful of contenders that appeared to meet all my criteria. And all was sunshine and buttercups until the Human Rights Campaign released its confounding 2008 Corporate Equality Index, a.k.a. the “good to the gays” rap sheet.

As an operative for the Gay Agenda, I’m well acquainted with the Corporate Equality Index, which reports the results of surveys returned by hundreds of large corporations, detailing their LGBT inclusion in employment and public outreach policies. Even if it weren’t my job to pay attention to the list, I’d find it worth studying. With LGBT rights increasingly politicized by BushCheney Inc., how we spend our money has become at least as powerful as how we vote, an idea underscored by the fact that while we’re still having trouble getting a law passed at the federal level that would make it illegal to fire an employee simply for being gay—currently A-OK in 31 states—nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies who responded to the HRC survey met every single LGBT-friendly criterion set forth, which is no cakewalk: In order to receive a perfect score on the CEI, employers must prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation as well as gender identity and expression; provide diversity training covering each of the above; offer a transgender wellness benefit; offer employees’ domestic partners the same benefits package as married spouses; and support an LGBT employees’ resource group. Compared to LGBT rights at the federal level, such corporate policies are nothing short of extraordinary.

Anyhow, this year I have rededicated myself to putting my money where my rights are, and it is with a heavy heart that I report Land O’Lakes received a measly score of 53 on the CEI. According to the chart accompanying that score, LO’L fails to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression; fails to provide diversity training in areas of sexual orientation or gender expression; has no LGBT employee resource group; and makes no effort to include LGBT populations in advertising, marketing, or philanthropy.

For the record, I’ve identified a number of companies with lackluster scores with whom I’ve done business in the past but have no problem abandoning until they get it together to show my people some love. In most such cases, there is at least one counterpart company that seems to have my back. To wit:

• Barnes & Noble got a 63? Fine. Borders got 100 (and I like its stores better anyway).

• Bayer got a 15? Fifteen? Are you fucking kidding me? Wouldn’t you think a company that’s been sued by multiple Holocaust survivors claiming the company was involved in concentration camp medical experiments and other war atrocities would try just a little harder to redeem itself in the 21st century? It isn’t as if Bayer has no competition in the rarefied field of pain relief, or even more narrowly, aspirin, which, having been invented in the late 19th century, isn’t exactly a patented formula these days. (Interestingly—to me, at least—Bayer fought tooth and nail in the early 20th century to trademark the name “Aspirin” and was repeatedly refused, even by its own German government. When the company finally won a trademark suit, in the United States naturally, it began to charge up to 10 times as much for its product here as in the rest of the world. Then in World War I the Allies seized Bayer’s assets, along with those of just about every other German company, and by 1921 “aspirin” had been reduced to a lowly lowercase genericism.)

Should you care for a tablet or two, might I suggest Walgreens’ generic version? The company not only scored a perfect 100 on the CEI but stood its ground when Christian right organizations appealed to their crazy fundamentalist minions to boycott the brand, asserting that the company, in giving money to the 2006 Gay Games, was promoting casual gay sex in an effort to increase the HIV-positive population and thus the client base for prescription medications sold in its pharmacies. I don’t make this shit up. The company disregarded the lunacy and stood by its support of the Games, held in the company’s hometown of Chicago that year. Go, Walgreens!

• ExxonMobil Corp., number 1 on the Fortune 500, got a big old doughnut, just as it does every year. Meaning not only that it fails to meet any criteria for gay and lesbian inclusion but that its PR folks gleefully return a survey to HRC saying so (whereas they could simply ignore the query), implying that such failures may even be a point of pride in the company ranks. Not content merely to ignore gay rights, Exxon managed to regress them when it acquired Mobil, rescinding the latter company’s existing gay and lesbian nondiscrimination policy and domestic-partner benefits. To put that 0 in perspective, and please don’t take this as an endorsement of Wal-fucking-Mart, but yes, even the big W-M, number 2 on the Fortune 500 list, offers the small concession of a written nondiscrimination policy covering sexual orientation and provides diversity training to its employees, earning the world’s most ironic smiley face a 40 on the CEI.

Like Bayer, Exxon has a bit of a gaffe in its past—the whole Exxon Valdez thingy—that one might think would cause the PR department to work that much harder to overcome its poor public image. (BTW, Exxon has yet to pay court-awarded damages to 33,000 fisherman and landowners negatively impacted by the Exxon Valdez’s pollution of 1,200 miles of Alaskan coastline. After being ordered in 1994, five years after the disaster, to pay $5 billion in punitive damages, Exxon filed appeal after appeal seeking to duck the penalty, which at the time of judgment represented one year’s clear profit for the corporation. Even after the award was reduced to $2.5 billion by a federal appeals court, an amount that now represents just three weeks of profit for the corporation, Exxon appealed to our big business–friendly Supreme Court, which, yeppers, agreed on October 29 of this year to hear the case sometime in the spring of 2008—meaning that we the taxpayers continue to pay for America’s most powerful corporation’s refusal to cooperate with a 13-year-old jury award that has since been reduced by half even as inflation has made the amount increasingly insignificant to the company. Something to think about when choosing a filling station.)

Chevron (which also owns Texaco) and BP (which also owns Arco and Amoco) both received perfect scores on the CEI. With a gas station at just about every major intersection, we have options, so if you can’t ride your bike or walk or take mass transit to work, while there might not be a true “best” choice for your fossil fuel needs, there sure as hell is a worst.

• FedEx got a 55? Fine. UPS not only earned 100 on the CEI but came in at number 39 on this year’s Best Corporate Citizens list, which scores large companies according to criteria such as community relations, diversity, employee relations, and environmental efforts. Besides which, deliverywomen look hot in their UPS browns.

For the record, the other companies who earned perfect CEI scores and are among the 100 Best Corporate Citizens are, in order of BCC ranking: Nike, Motorola, Intel, IBM, Agilent, Starbucks, General Mills, Herman Miller, Dell, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, Adobe, the Gap, Google, Eastman Kodak, American Express, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo, Xerox, Bright Horizons, Sun Microsystems, Best Buy, Lexmark, Nordstrom, KeyCorp, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Principal Financial.

Hey, not all corporations are bad.

As much as I want to adhere to the lists for all my consumer decisions, there are instances where that’s impossible. Of the three pharmaceutical giants whose products I require enjoy, two received perfect scores, while the third received an 85. AstraZeneca fails to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression; while this issue is pretty close to my heart—because I think it’s utterly absurd that anyone should get antsy about anyone else’s personal presentation and, let’s face it, I have a somewhat alternative PP myself—I feel that it is, mentally speaking, both easier and wiser to reconcile such an omission in AZ’s employee relations than to go off a med that keeps me relatively sane.

I also recognize that I often have no idea how smaller companies, who are not rated by HRC, conduct themselves. Just as not all corporations are bad, not all mom-and-pops are good. In my nine years of service to an independent music store—during which I served as the senior buyer and witnessed its expansion from a 1,000-square-foot strip mall space to a 5,500-square-foot store, moving twice to accommodate its growth—I never received a single paid vacation or sick day, and I was completely uninsured. Nevertheless, anyone who shopped there felt superior for not shopping at nearby chain music stores like Virgin and Tower, who undoubtedly compensated their key employees more fairly.

While the competing low-fat, non-hydrogenated buttery spreads I’ve located are hardly mom-and-pop enterprises, they are marketed by companies that fly a little further under the radar than LO’L (number 301 on the Fortune 500). For instance: Smart Balance and Earth Balance, my leading contenders to replace LO’L. The Balance sisters are two of only three buttery spreads available at Whole Foods, which outright bans any products made with hydrogenated oils. (While Whole Foods’ score of 90 isn’t perfect, it beats 75, awarded to both Safeway [which owns Vons] and Kroger [which owns Ralphs]. My overall grocer preference is for Trader Joe’s, which is too small to be rated.) The third was a rice-based spread, at the idea of which le domestique made a face.

As it turns out, the Smart Balance® and Earth Balance® products I tried are both contender-worthy. At least I think so. Le domestique criticizes SB’s spreadability factor, which is very low. While it melts obligingly enough on hot skillets and just-toasted bread, it is otherwise as dedicated to its solid form as LO’L is to its liquid. Which confuses me, because the very reason hydrogenated oils show up in so many processed foods is that hydrogenation solidifies oil—fully hydrogenated oil is shortening—making it very versatile in achieving desired consistencies. I had assumed LO’L melted all over the damn world because of its lack of such hydrogenation; it certainly isn’t due to its inclusion of actual butter, which in its refrigerated form is about as spreadable as my dog’s jaw when I need to give him a pill.

Despite my desire to pronounce the Balance sisters both delicious and pro-gay, and therefore my new BBFs, I think it’s only fair that I do my best to hold the smaller companies to the same standard as the larger ones, so I sent the following e-mail to Smart Balance Inc. (as well as Trader Joe’s, while I was at it):

Hi there—

Can you please tell me whether your company promotes LGBT inclusion by including sexual orientation and gender identity/expression in its employee nondiscrimination policy? And, where applicable, are the domestic partners of your employees entitled to the same benefits as married spouses? I enjoy your products very much, and as a consumer it’s important that I spend money with companies that support my rights. Thanks very much for your time!

Best regards—

Teresa Morrison

I acknowledge that whoever fields consumer feedback may dismiss mine as the work of a crank, and I imagine that if I receive a reply at all, it will be along the lines of:

Dear Ms. Morrison—

Thanks for your feedback about our products! Please use the attached coupons to continue enjoying them.

Kind regards—

Your New BBFs

Then I figured that as long as I’m corresponding with the corps, maybe I owe it to LO’L’s rich buttery flavor to give it another chance. After all, according to the company’s corporate home page, “Land O’Lakes Inc. values and recognizes the unique talents and potential of all employees and is committed to continue to build a diverse workforce.” I figured I should drop LO’L a line to let the feedback folks know of my quandary and offer them a chance to tell me about any upcoming diversity planning.

Hi there—

I’ve long enjoyed many of your products, particularly your light butter with canola oil. It’s difficult to find a butter spread that’s both low in fat and free of hydrogenated oils, and yours happens to be my favorite.

As such, I was dismayed to see that Land O’Lakes Inc. earned a relatively low score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. I recognize and appreciate that you prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and that you offer your employees’ domestic partners benefits equivalent to those of married spouses. But many Fortune 500 companies like yours now explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression as well, which I think is necessary for the full inclusion you strive for in your workforce.

I hope that you’ll consider adding such protections to your written nondiscrimination policy; LGBT issues are becoming increasingly politicized, not so much by LGBT people themselves as by our own state and federal governments, and sometimes it seems that our only political capital lies in spending power. In such a scenario, it’s essential that I put my money where my rights are, and I would love to be able to include your products in the “buy” column of my consumer activism campaign.

Thanks very much for your time!

Best regards—

Teresa Morrison

I’ve thrown down the exceedingly polite gauntlet, and now all I can do is wait to see whether either, neither, or both of these companies care to answer my plea for just one delicious buttery spread that has my gender-vague lesbian back. If not, we may have to try that rice stuff. Le domestique hopes it won’t come to that.

————————————————————————————————-

November 6 update!

I have just received the following reply from Trader Joe’s:

Teresa,
We appreciate your inquiry and bringing your concerns to our attention. Trader Joe’s specifically prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. We also offer the same benefits to a Crew Member’s qualified same-sex partner as we would to a Crew Member’s opposite-sex married partner.

Sincerely,
Amy
Trader Joe’s
Customer Relations

Yay, Trader Joe’s!

—————————————————————————————–

November 11 update!

Smart Balance Inc. responds:

Dear Ms. Morrison—

Yes, to all questions asked.

Sincerely,

Smart Balance Customer Relations

Brief? Perhaps. But affirmative all the same.

I have long harbored fantasies that I will one day publish the funniest book ever written about bipolar illness. I know, right? It’s about time. And I’m not just talking about the good times to be had with party girl hypo- and her edgier cousin mania—they’re already laughing at their own jokes, most of which aren’t funny unless you’re in their head space. No, it’s depression I want to make fodder of, if for no other reason than the self-serving one: so that I can bring the funny wherever I go, even on a long walk down a dark corridor of indeterminate length, with bottomless cliffs on each side, yawning infinity straight ahead, and an entry point some ways back that sealed itself shut even as I stepped through.

Comedy seldom throws down with depression in a way that’s at all successful or satisfying—at least to those who have done lockdown time in its super-max cell block. That said, props to Avenue Q’s awesome Bad Idea Bears who, finding the lead male muppet Princeton bereft in the second act, suggest in a voice reminiscent of Snuggles the fabric-softener spokesbear, “Well, you can always hang yourself! Yayyyy! We found this rope!” at which the cuddly yellow girl bear proffers a noose.

Seriously, I laughed my ass off.

For the record, I’m basking in the sunshiny light of day right now. Truly. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that here, and I really ought to set aside space to honor it. Having felt despondent through damn near the entire 21st century to date, I am now entering my seventh straight month of largely unbroken fine mood. Neither up nor down, I am simply and blissfully well, and believe you me, I don’t take this gift of stability for granted.

Still, I never know whether I’m out on furlough, parole, or straight-up time served, and I’m forever on the lookout for the warden, ’cause that bitch hates me. So it is that, while I don’t plan on returning to the big house anytime soon—and the first commenter who suggests I can avoid such by embracing the awesome power of The Secret is on my lifetime shit list, very much like the friend who once told me that people who wear glasses only think they can’t see without them—I am realistic about the chance that I will be thrall to depression’s long arm in future. That’s why psychologist types call this thing a disorder, not a silly old patch of sad.

Therapists tell folks like me to put together survival kits during these up times, when we have the clarity of mind to select entertainment and mementos best turned to in a crisis—because the depressed person will reliably reach for the worst possible companion to her mental state. The ice cream that feeds my depression comes in a variety of drably irresistible flavors, including but not limited to: documentaries about down-and-outers; nonfiction on subjects like genocide, addiction, and prison; memoirs by people with mood disorders who may or may not have already tried to or managed to kill themselves; and, perhaps the worst influence of all, my own racing thoughts. In short, I reach for that which reflects my world view.

Say, doesn’t this post cry out for pictures of baby animals?

At times I’ve sought solace during dark periods by reading about the disorder and the workings of the brain in general, trying to get the lay of the land, as if one can rationalize the irrational and thus disempower it once and for all. But a visit to any bookstore’s psychology section will leave a person feeling more pathologized and diminished than before: The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide, Surviving Manic Depression, Surviving the Crisis of Depression and Bipolar Illness. The ubiquity of this word survival in the bipolar literature presumes a couple of things: that mortality is my primary concern, and that survival is an end in itself. I appreciate all the parachutes, but I’m looking for something beyond living through each episode.

Depression can be fatal not so much because it just makes a person so sad they want to die but because it brings meaninglessness into high relief, taunting its host that the past is empty, the future is hopeless, and nothing can ever change those “truths.” And no matter how many missives I write to myself in better times, earnestly telling the depressed me who will eventually read them that it gets better, that I’ll get through this episode just as I’ve gotten through dozens before, my own words of encouragement fire as blanks when I’m in-country. The dialect of wellness is inaccessible.

That communication gap affects humor as well. Most things that are funny or uplifting when we’re in a good place simply deflate in the depressed brain, as if a different language is being spoken, stripping comedy of any meaning. Yet there is great meaning to be found in humor, and funny is possible in depression. I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed harder, inwardly or out, than I did during my last couple of days in the psych hospital. I didn’t laugh in response to any intended entertainment, whether on TV or in the book I was reading while there—Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a work of pure fiction which, incidentally, two of my nurses took to be a physics textbook and noted how very smart I must be to read such a thing for pleasure. (A minimum deduction of 50 I.Q. points is assessed all who enter the clink, as though mental illness is but a euphemism for mental retardation.)

I laughed on the inside when my intake nurse—amid her recitation of about a thousand rules as to what patients are and are not allowed from home, as related to my partner when she came to visit me that first surreal night—said in the direct company of my somewhat addled but nevertheless conscious self that “they can’t have caffeine because it stimulates their brains.” On being relegated to third-person status in such a situation, especially when the stimulation of one’s own brain is under discussion, let me just say that the ability to laugh is the only mechanism that’s going to save your ass from the eight kinds of crazy you assumed in the staffers’ eyes the moment the medical transport dudes wheeled you through the door.

I laughed audibly not at our actual “movie night” entertainment but at the fact that the films came from a distributor that edits videos exclusively for exhibition among institutional populations—primarily prisoners and mental patients—omitting all depictions of violence, sex, nudity, profanity, drug use, drinking, self-destructive behavior, mental imbalance, and anything else that might be deemed disturbing or stimulating to their brains. What was left, you ask? I’m not sure; I retreated to my room to read instead.

When I earned a promotion to ward 3—the lowest-security unit, housing all us high-functioning types; my stay had been initiated on unit 2, where they keep the low- to medium-functioning patients as well as folks on suicide watch—I at last found some gals I could relate to and laugh with, the camaraderie and normalcy of our interactions helping to defuse some of the feelings of stigma and self-doubt that inevitably come with having traded freedom for safety, having committed one’s own care at the most basic level to the discretion of others. It is, readers, a head trip of the most explosive sort, a virtual tear-down of the psyche through which one’s foundation may emerge reinforced or compromised—but the change itself is inevitable. Those unit 3 girls, together with my amazing partner—who was there every minute of every available visiting hour to laugh at my jokes and stories about this Jabberwocky world I found myself in—helped to ensure my essential soundness on release.

My less corporeal savior was writing. Every day, whenever the grid didn’t command my presence elsewhere, I wrote. And every night I processed each day, lying prone on my tiny institutional bed, by scribbling random thoughts with a felt-tip coloring pen I had pilfered from the day room—the grown-up rollerball pens my partner had brought me on night one were segregated as sharps, contraband, and sent back home with her, though I was allowed to keep the writing tablets she’d thoughtfully packed.

While I have on occasion looked back on events in my life with slight regret for having experienced them more as a journalist than as an intimate, my mad detachment skills came in pretty handy in the clink. The ability to become a wry observer was not just useful but necessary in maintaining a measure of dignity and self-respect. So long as I was noting the weirdness of my situation, I could assure myself that I was still me, that I wasn’t that subpar being reflected in the staffers’ eyes, the wild-eyed mental patient who needed to be reminded to groom herself (right there on the grid, between breakfast and group therapy). “Who, me?” I could say when the patronizing air of the nurses got too thick. “Oh, I’m just here for the material.”

Happily, I probably won’t be returning to the big house. Studies of mental hospital recidivism—interestingly, the same term used to describe repeat trips to prison—find that only around 30% of those who have ever checked into a mental hospital, voluntarily or not, will return. (Perhaps that speaks more to the non-luxe accommodations than improved mental health, but we’ll gloss that for now.) On the other hand, I remain realistic about the fact that hope is a tenuous, intangible thing—ebbing and flowing with the tide of my corrupt brain chemicals—and when its absence coincides with my mind’s ruder machinations, well, commitment is a far better choice than that offered up by the Bad Idea Bears.

As it goes, finding the funny in humor-averse situations is quite a lot easier than articulating it—unless one happens to live on Avenue Q. But those takeaway memories of transcendence lend us strength and give meaning to the rudimentary act of survival. Of course there’s more to life than the comedy therein, but that other stuff can be a devil to access when we need it most, whereas laughter has never, ever failed me. Funny takes the edge off when we’ve been unfairly judged, and it restores that measure of respect and integrity so rudely wrested away when we acknowledged a weakness and asked for help. It’s not for nothing that we’ve coined the term gallows humor: When our hands are tied and we’re face-to-face with our would-be executioner, the refuge of the mind is our only irrevocable freedom, and in that moment, when the mind can’t help but race, I’d rather dwell on life’s absurdities than on what it’s going to feel like when the rope catches and my neck snaps.

If you’re thinking right about now that this whole post about humor really isn’t all that funny, I agree with you. It started with a couple of funny ideas, then, as with so many of these posts, it grew quite beyond its author’s control—in this case, my rangy, wisecracking teenager matured into a somber adult who rather insisted on talking about this difficult period in her life that she’s still trying to make sense of. Because even as it’s just about impossible for me to initiate any serious conversation without cracking a joke, it’s fairly inevitable that the truth lurking therein will eventually break through to sternly ask what the hell everybody’s laughing about. And I guess that’s my quandary. The reason I’m almost certain to fail in my effort to produce the funniest book ever written about depression is this: Humor builds a bridge to what’s real.

That also happens to be why I find it essential.

Katherine Heigl and I don’t look very much alike. Oh, sure, there are similarities—the swanlike sweep of the neck, the winsome girl-next-door quality, the overall luminosity—but few would mistake us for twins or sisters or even species mates. Which is why it was worrying when my partner of 13 years went, well, kinda moony when Heigl arrived at The Advocate’s 40th anniversary party last week.

One minute I was holding forth about how much I dislike drinking perfectly respectable beverages out of martini glasses—

“Katherine Heigl is here,” le domestique blurted.

I looked toward the door and traced the ethereal glow to its energy source.

I would show you a picture of myself from the party, but my efforts to duck the paparazzi were apparently completely successful. Instead, here I am in my front yard.

Eerily dissimilar, aren’t we?

“T.R. must have brought her—they’re best friends,” I said knowingly, having fact-checked T.R. Knight’s cover story in which he said so. (I didn’t actually check with Knight or his publicist to confirm that Heigl is his best friend because [a] we don’t verify interview quotes unless they seem wrong, incendiary, or just weird, [b] I think it’s reasonable to think that Heigl is in fact his best friend, [c] ringing him up to ask “But is she really your best friend?” would regress us both to grade-school sensibility, and [d] fact-checking is, much as the term connotes, concerned with objective facts—spellings of proper names, exact dates, ages, etc.—whereas best-friend status is subjective, as can be seen by flipping through the autograph pages of your high school yearbooks.)

Knight was among the last of the invited celebrity hosts to arrive. I had already stalked Jane Lynch to some degree, or she had stalked me—I’m honestly not sure which. All I know is that every time I looked up she was within six feet of me, and she’s very tall, so if she had lain down at any point during the night her head might have landed in my lap.

Had Jane Lynch’s head fallen in my lap, I’d like to think I might have said something terribly witty—which would absolutely exclude “Come here often?”—but I was in a bit of a buzz state most of the night, so I probably would have said something like, “Yer hair’s pretty.”

The buzz wasn’t so much cultivated as thrust upon me. Immediately after entering the venue and ascertaining the whereabouts of the facilities, as one should, le domestique and I were confronted with one of several bars sprinkled about the event. In keeping with the evening’s general conviviality and open-bar rules, which practically insist that one take on hard liquor, I ordered a Manhattan, bourbon being my favorite among your grain alcohols.

The pretty and somewhat flirty bartender gamely reached behind the many bottles of (event beverage sponsor) Skyy vodka for the lone bottle of Maker’s Mark. She poured the bourbon generously, augmenting it with the merest glances of vermouth and bitters, and dispensed it into a Skyy martini glass. Then she frowned and, with a mock-pout that reads as sexy, said, “I don’t have any cherries.”

“Quite all right,” I said. “No garnish necessary.”

“I’ll give you more bourbon instead,” she said brightly, turning back to her bottle stock to retrieve the beverage sponsor of generations of sailors and prostitutes. Listen, nothing garnishes a 98% bourbon drink better than bourbon, especially when there’s none of that messy ice to potentially melt and throw off the delicate balance of the bourbon and air that make up one’s cocktail.

Ordinarily I’m kind of a wallflower at parties, but you know how wallflowers get with the aid of multiple-shot bourbon cocktails. Yep, I was a sort of fuzzy wallflower—like maybe a bulrush. And with all those lowered inhibitions I was not about to move along when the wall I happened to choose, sort of off to one side of the stage, turned out to be the zone where all the fancy people were queuing before and after taking the dais.

I will stand very close to as many celebrities as I please, thanks very much! Not that anyone was trying to get me to move. But, you know, sober me would have of her very own volition hustled out of fancy town to make way for fancier folk than myself.

I think I was saying something about wanting to lick William Baldwin, because really, how often do you get your chance to lick a Baldwin, when—

“Katherine Heigl needs a drink,” le domestique said with no small amount of urgency. “Someone should get Katherine Heigl a drink.”

I turned my head toward the Knight-Heigls to see them just chitchatting away with the gays. She didn’t seem in crisis at the time, but I understand an elevated hydration level is required if one is to glow so constantly. Also, I think fluids help to maintain healthy pores, and an actress can’t be too careful in the age of hi-def TV. Just as squeaky-voiced silent film stars lost their livelihood in the transition to talkies, HD may prove ruinous to the careers of the large-pored set.

“She was doing this,” le domestique said, tipping her hand toward her mouth with her pinky extended—the universal symbol for thirstiness.

Le domestique’s enchantment with Heigl was only fair. On the way to the party I mentioned that the guest I most wanted to meet—or more appropriately, stand really close to—was Jenny Shimizu. Le domestique hadn’t heard of her.

“The really androgynous dyke model from those Calvin Klein ads in the ’90s,” I offered.

Blank stare.

“She was a mechanic in West Hollywood until she was ‘discovered,’ then she became a big-time altie model,” I said. “Oh, and she was Madonna’s lover.” With that, I had offered my entire inventory of knowledge about Jenny Shimizu. “Anyway, she’s hot.”

“How androgynous is she?”

“In the Calvin Klein ads she could have gone either way,” I enthused.

“I worry about your type,” le domestique said, not being at all androgynous herself.

Over the years, and certainly in the week since the party, we’ve had a conversation or two as to “types”: whether we have them, what they are, the number of ways in which we each seem to resemble the other’s not at all.

Is le domestique interested in a willowy, blond evocation of Audrey Hepburn? If so, I’m in trouble. I go whole days and sometimes weeks without remembering that I’m a chica. And my moments of feminine lucidity are generally prompted not by a mirror but by a stranger whose quizzical eyes dart furtively from my face to my breasts and back again. (It’s fun or irritating, depending on my mood.)

Am I obsessed with straight-hipped, flat-chested boy-girls? Le domestique is very much a woman, with hips and breasts and curves and everything. She has medium-long hair, soft features, and a professional wardrobe that I would describe as “flowy.”

In light of such disparate attractions, neither of us can be faulted for worrying that we’re not keeping the home fires stoked properly.

But when we scrutinized each other’s supposed types, we stumbled on an interesting truth: We had each identified an ideal that reveals much more about our personal conceptions of womanhood than about what we’re attracted to in a partner. Mine is outwardly tough, even forbidding, and inscrutable to those who don’t know her—though in my fantasy she has a soft nougat center. Le domestique’s ideal is outwardly soft and radiant, but she’s approachable and authentic and, one gets the sense, having the last laugh on folks who only think they know her.

Heigl and Shimizu, I think, provide us with real-world faces for our personal mental constructs of gender. Mine is just a little more, um, third-sexed than hers.

Readers, you’ll be pleased to know that someone did retrieve a drink for Katherine Heigl. Sadly, I never did see Jenny Shimizu at the party; I just assumed she hadn’t made it—she’s very distinctive, and the guest list was cozy enough that one could fairly easily find anyone she might be looking for. But in the days to follow I saw pictures from the party, and there she was—with a new “girl” haircut!

Sweet Jenny, I thought we had an understanding.

(Psst. Click here to read my new piece on Advocate.com.)