We are the change we've been waiting for.

A little "art" I created in a Naropa class last week:  Anna
Dickinson, the 19th century Quaker abolitionist and
orator (and lesbian) observing 9-year-old (lesbian) me.

While Facebook friends and my classmates and professors at Naropa's Summer Writing Program celebrated the SCOTUS marriage-equality decision last Friday, I struggled with anger.  What were we celebrating, really?  The Supreme Court's decision that my fiancé and I deserve basic human rights?  I thought about the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision, and wondered if African American families felt celebratory or exhausted and angry when it was announced.  Of course my child should get to attend school with your child.  It's about time.  Or the 1919 passing of the 19th Amendment, which enfranchised women in the United States 143 years after Abigail Adams pleaded with her husband John to "remember the ladies" as he helped write the text of the U.S. Constitution.  I've seen the photographs of women celebrating the amendment, victoriously holding their placards aloft.  But surely they felt anger, too.  One hundred and forty-three years?   The fight was painful, vitriolic.  Opponents hurled insults at the suffragettes:  she's really a man, she neglects her children, she's a Sapphist. Many suffragettes did not live to see their dream of the vote realized.  When justice takes so long, how can we forgive the time frame and just celebrate?

I carried these brooding thoughts with me to a table at the Naropa Café, where my poet-friend Val was gesturing for me to join her.  Val is much older than I am:  short gray hair, life-worn, a poet shaman who wears bright scarves, believes her dreams, and talks openly of a difficult past she barely survived.  We're connected because we're both writers and we're both lesbians.

"I can't shake this anger I'm feeling today," I told her.  My bones felt heavy.  I told Val what I'd been thinking about Brown and Abigail and celebrations, and she nodded, agreeing, but I caught the glint of loving amusement in her eyes.  And suddenly, I heard how young I sounded.  I came out as a lesbian at age 28, in 2005, after famous people like Ellen had begun to come out (1997), after the last sodomy law was overturned in Texas (2003), after Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage (2004).  I was born eight years after the Stonewall Riots (1969).  And I didn't feel like celebrating?  In the middle of my own sentence, I burst out laughing.

Val grinned.  "The world is changing," she said.  "It's our work to be midwives to all this change.  We've got to celebrate.  It's our work."

It's our work.  I celebrated the rest of the day without hesitation, cheering with all the rest when Anne Waldeman introduced our Friday colloquium with a joyful fist in the air and a "How about that Supreme Court decision?" I checked Facebook more often than usual, and felt only glad to see all the rainbows.  Meredith texted from the World Series of Poker in Vegas:  "Because of the Supreme Court decision today, I've already won!"  Determined to be a midwife for all this change, whenever it arrives, a friend and I toasted Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer at dinner that night.  What does anger accomplish?  The change is happening.  People who struggled with police at Stonewall never thought they'd see this day.

This morning, I sit outside on the front porch with my coffee, the sprinklers nourishing the new plants in our garden, and contemplate change in my own life.  In four years, Mitike and I have moved three times:  Juneau to Fort Collins, Fort Collins to Boulder, and now to Denver. Four years ago, Ali died.  Only two years ago, I emerged from living all the time inside grief.  And now, in this past year and a half, as if something in me was finally prepared to midwife good, life-giving change:  I met Meredith, I got a few pieces published, I earned an MFA, I found a good high school English job, and I got engaged.  When the assistant principal at South High asked me why I was moving to Denver, I told her I was moving in with my fiancé, and that she lives just a few miles from the school.  It wasn't long ago that it was dangerous for a teacher to come out to an administrator.  The assistant principal just smiled and said, "Congratulations!  Will the kids have to get used to you having a new last name next year, then?"

This morning, I feel only joy.  Yes, these changes that seem obvious take too long.  Yes, we have a long way to go in this country to craft a safe and equal world for people of all races, backgrounds, sexual orientation, etc.  But this morning, I'm watching the sun glint off the droplets of water on my new yarrow and coneflower plants.  In a year, I'm hoping these plants fill this garden, but they're still new.  They're waiting for the soil to be right for their roots, for the sun and rain to nourish them just enough.  Then they'll grow tall and full.  For now, I'll stand nearby and write, a midwife for all this good change.

Why we all need to think about Ferguson and Michael Brown.

I'm a white mother of an African child.  Over six years ago, when I adopted Mitike from Ethiopia, I promised (via a required adoption agency online course) that I would do my best to become culturally aware and to surround my child with diverse experiences that would instill pride and a sense of belonging in her.  I can do better.  I'm raising my now seven-year-old in Boulder, CO, so we have to travel to get to the Ethiopian church in Aurora or to Ethiopian heritage camp outside of Chicago.  Even a regular trip to the Denver Zoo makes her exclaim, "Finally, other brown people!" I've written elsewhere of the gift it was to sit in the hair salon on Colfax for four hours while two Malian hairdressers divided Mitike's hair into tiny cornrowed braids. For the entire morning, I was the only white person in sight, and Mitike noticed.  "It's good for you," she told me later.

These are the stories I usually share about parenting a child of color.  Or I tell about Mitike's own growing awareness of her difference.  Or I detail the saga of my learning how to care for her hair.  Or I recount the story about the lady who told us that Halle Berry's mother just told her she was beautiful every day, which empowered her to stand up to a hostile world.

But the story of Michael Brown's shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, moves this conversation to a different place.  When I heard the news on NPR of the August 9 shooting, Mitike was coloring at the kitchen table.  I looked at her, and her brown eyes were wide, and I chose to not turn off the radio.  At dinner, we talked about it.  "I just don't understand why, if he wasn't doing anything wrong," she told me.  None of our conversation was about race.  I didn't want to make note of it unless she did, and she wanted to focus more on the unfairness of the situation, that an armed police officer would shoot an unarmed teenager who had correctly put his hands in the air.  I'm certain Mitike would have discussed the event in the same way if an unarmed white teenager had been shot by a black police officer, instead.

It's not that my 7-year-old is unaware of the complicated ways race intertwines with justice and opportunity in this country.  Every January, her class studies Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and finds out how he utilized non-violent resistance to insist segregation was wrong.  Last year, in first grade, they added Rosa Parks to this strangely isolated study of race relations in the U.S.  The chapter books Mitike finds to read now have overwhelmingly white protagonists; the few with protagonists of color are nearly all about the Civil Rights Movement.  Sometimes, she chooses books with white characters just so she can get a lighter-hearted story.  Someone needs to write a series of books that feature a strong African-American girl in the modern day, doing normal things, like trying to be a kid in a complicated world.

Mitike knows about slavery, again from children's books.  She knows about the Civil War.  She knows about segregation and poverty (largely from her love of the Ruby Bridges story).  But until this summer, she thought (and I let her think) that all of this racial strife was in this country's past.  Surely, the adults had fixed it, right?  It was only days after we heard the NPR coverage of Michael Brown's shooting that Mitike asked me at bedtime one night, "Did they shoot Michael Brown for the same reason they shot Dr. King?"

I'm sorry to say I'm not surprised that the Grand Jury in Ferguson failed to indict Darren Wilson, the white officer who shot Michael Brown.  Evidently, grand juries do not have a reputation for indicting police officers.  I'm not surprised, and I'm still angry.  The thousands of people protesting across the country tonight are not just protesting the death of Michael Brown; they're asking for a nation-wide examination of why a disproportionate number of people in prison are people of color; of why a disproportionate number of people in poverty are people of color; of why schools comprised predominately of kids of color often have fewer resources and inferior support.  An African American woman told an NPR reporter today in Ferguson that she hopes awareness and justice come from the tragedy of Michael Brown's death.  This has been a long, ugly road, this construction of "race" in the United States, and the road -- and the ugliness -- continue.

Of course, the conversation is even more complicated by class.  Mitike, as the daughter of a middle-class social studies teacher in Boulder, Colorado, is inevitably growing up differently than a 7-year-old girl in Ferguson, Missouri or Sanford, Florida, where Treyvon Martin was shot.  She's also a girl, which further shifts the perceptions strangers might have of her.  The conversation we should all be having is not just about race, but about the ways in which race, class and gender tangle in the United States, and what we can do about it.

What can we do about it?  Well, I could close my eyes.  I could tell myself that my daughter is safe here in Boulder, and that this problem is distant from us.  But I could only pretend that because I'm white.  Because I can walk into a public space and hold all kinds of power because my skin color is perceived to be white.  Talk to me long enough and find out I'm lesbian, find out I've got an African child, and that one category -- skin color -- gets complicated, but because the first wave of perception in this country is of skin color, I could accept the tempting comfort of dominant culture.  I could say the story of Michael Brown is a tragedy but that it doesn't apply to me.  And I'd be wrong.  Not just because I'm the parent of a child of color, but because I'm a citizen of this country, and I want it to change.  I can do something about it (read "12 Things White People Can Do").  Every day that I teach middle school social studies, I push my students to see the connections between then and now, to ask questions and more questions about what has shaped and continues to shape this country.  There's always more I can do, but getting the next generation to ask questions seems like an important start.

Just now, I sat at the foot of my daughter's bed and watched her sleep awhile.  She looked so perfectly peaceful, secure beneath her purple comforter, surrounded by a crowd of stuffed animals.  I don't know what to tell her about this country I've given her.  I don't know how to keep her safe.  I don't know how to explain why, yes, even now I believe things could get better.  They do, here.  Again and again, history's surprised us like that.  It all begins with a few voices demanding justice.

Mitike's voice will be one of those, I'm certain.  And maybe strengthening that voice is the most important job I have.

An interview with Fringe Fest playwright/rapper/actress Erika Kate MacDonald!

Boulder's always interesting, always surprising Fringe Festival begins on Thursday, September 18, and runs through September 28. I'm honored to interview playwright and actress Erika Kate MacDonald, creator of "Tap Me on the Shoulder," which she'll perform at the Dairy Center for the Arts on various dates (see below).  "Tap Me on the Shoulder," a one-woman show, is the autobiographical story of how Erika Kate started rapping unexpectedly as an adult. Set in a tiny Brooklyn living room, Erika Kate uses original raps to tell stories that range from Indonesian dance class to rural New Hampshire to Minneapolis bike punks to the Indigo Girls.

Here, Erika Kate shares her thoughts on queering rap, on the freedom of fringe festivals, and on fluid identity worth celebrating. Love what she has to say here? Attend a performance of her show! Ticket information below:

Ticket link:  www.boulderfringe.com/programs/2014/theater-2014/pack-of-others-3/  

Tickets: $12/$10 Students and Seniors

Show dates and times (60 minutes):

Thu. 9/18 – 4:00pm (2-for-1 discount!)

Fri. 9/19 – 8:00pm

Sun. 9/21 – 4:30pm

Mon. 9/22 – 8:00pm (Erika Kate's birthday! Buy 4, get 1 free!)

Tue. 9/23 – 9:30pm

Plus one more show:

Fri. 9/26 – 4:30pm

Venue:

Dairy East Theater

in the Dairy Center for the Arts

2590 Walnut Street, Boulder, CO

***

BOULDER LESBIAN: How did you come up with the idea for this one-woman show?  I love the variety of topics – sexuality, Indonesia, rap, race.  Why this story?

ERIKA KATE: Because this is my story.  

OK, OK, the answer is not quite that simple of course.  This is an autobiographical piece, and so these themes are present in this story because they have all been important in my own life.  (Indonesia, for instance, makes an appearance in some way in nearly all of my work, because the time that I spent there was formative in many good and some very challenging ways.)  The seed of this story is rap.  But the first question I ran into hard when I sat down to write about my journey into rapping was:  ‘How does anyone do anything for the first time?’  That’s what really set me off and running.  

BL: Why do you feel Tap Me on the Shoulder is a story worth telling?

EK: I want to take this moment to talk about the Fringe and why it is such an amazing phenomenon.  So many stories that are absolutely worth telling, but which may not have a Hollywood or Broadway sheen on them, can and do get told at the Fringe.  The Fringe is a 100% non-juried festival, artists are chosen at random via a lottery, and each artist receives 100% of the price of the ticket you buy to see their show.  Tap Me on the Shoulder is not a knee-slapping comedy or a shiny musical, it is a carefully-crafted and nuanced story about a queer white lady who grew up in rural New Hampshire and then, through a series of events, in her late 20s somehow finds herself deeply compelled by rap and the act of rapping.  I don’t know if a producer who was only interested in profit would consider that a story ‘worth telling,’ but at the Fringe we don’t have to care about that hypothetical producer.  We can tell the stories that we feel need to be told.

BL: How do you think rap relates to or interacts with issues of sexuality and race?

EK: If we’re talking about Rap with a capital ‘R’ this question is so multifaceted that I think I will not try to dig into it right here.  What I will say here is that my approach to rapping is very much my own and that is an important part of this story for me.  There is definitely a way in which what I am doing is ‘queering rap.’  I’m not Nicki Minaj, and my raps don’t sound like hers.  In order to do something you don’t need to accept every part of what everyone else has done with that thing.  Which I think is part of being queer.

BL: What do you want your audience to experience during the show?  What do you want them to walk away thinking or feeling?

EK: At one point in the show, I take a little break from my story to dissect (high-school-English-style) one verse from a famous 1994 rap song (come to the show if you want to find out which one).  Tap Me on the Shoulder is definitely about listening, about how challenging it can feel to really listen to someone else’s way of expressing themself, and also how essential it is that each of us is heard in our self-expression.  When I started writing raps I surprised myself as much if not more than I surprised anyone else.  This was not the way I had been taught to speak or write or sing.  It was an alternative form for me.  This show is meant to help people seek and find alternative ways to express themselves.  And one way to do that is to remove some of the fear we have around listening to things that are unfamiliar.  

BL: When you understood that my blog was lesbian-focused, you “warned” me that you are bi.  How do you interact with lesbian-only spaces?  How did you respond to the Curve magazine award, which listed your play as one of the “Top 10 Hottest Lesbian Plays”?

EK: I love words.  I love all the ways that language responds to and creates and interacts with our attempts to find each other.  And for that reason I try to be simultaneously as precise and as flexible as I can possibly be with language, particularly when it comes to talking and writing about sexuality and queerness.  I was so honored that my last play, FLUID (which I performed at the Boulder Fringe in 2007, as a matter of fact), received that recognition from Curve, and was included alongside such a lovely roster of talented queer artists.  And I am delighted to be featured on this blog as well, ‘lesbian-focused’ or otherwise.

BL: Is there anything else you want to tell my readers?

EK: Yes!  The Fringe is ten days long, stretching from Thursday, 9/18, all the way to the end of the following weekend, on Sunday, 9/28.  But nearly all of the performances of Tap Me on the Shoulder have been scheduled for the first weekend.  So, if you are interested in attending, and I hope you are, I’d suggest you buy your tickets now and plan to come to one of the first two shows.  Friday, 9/19 at 8:00pm is at a great time and should be a very fun show, or, if you have a more flexible or non-traditional schedule, come Thursday, 9/18 and tickets are 2-for-1.  

Ticket link (again!):  www.boulderfringe.com/programs/2014/theater-2014/pack-of-others-3/

Erika Kate’s website:

www.packofothers.org

The question of woman (and lesbian).

I want to keep the discussion we ten lesbians held this afternoon at Boulder's new Lesbian HERstory C.R. group private, so I'll just share this general observation:  a lesbian-only space contains a different energy, its own power, its own cocoon of safety.  Except for Indigo Girls concerts and bars like Seattle's Wild Rose, I've never actually been in a lesbian-only space until today, and I still feel emotional about the experience.  In the past three years, I've been lonely so much of the time, and today I felt entirely connected.  Heard.  Understood.

My brother-in-law, who, other than my former husband, is the kindest man I know, asked me a couple of weeks ago why I wanted to organize a lesbian-only event.  I stuttered through an inadequate answer.  Tonight, I can explain clearly:  because even in a world that increases its acceptance of lesbians every day, we need space to be with just each other.  We breathe differently there.

Insisting on lesbian-only or women-only space hasn't always been a popular approach, as I've just read in Michelle Goldberg's essay "What is a Woman?" in this week's New Yorker (August 4, 2014).  Goldberg's summary and analysis of the battle that has raged since the 1970s between radical feminists and transgendered male-to-female people includes decades of challenge to women-only space.  Goldberg focuses on the Michigan Womyn's Fest, which has been severely criticized by the transgendered community because it admits only "womyn-born womyn".  Musical groups like the Indigo Girls have announced boycotts of the event until it becomes trans-inclusive.  Women (womyn) on the other side of the debate have argued they simply need a women-only space for awhile, to feel safe and unencumbered by societal oppression.  The trans community has reacted with anger to that, saying it implies trans male-to-female people are unsafe.  Consider, too:  in the summer of 2010, some of the people at the protest camp Camp Trans committed acts of vandalism that included the spray-painting of a six-foot penis and the words "Real Women Have Dicks" on the side of a kitchen tent (Goldberg 28).  That kind of violence is of a specific kind, and it is counter to what the majority of male-to-female people argue they want:  inclusion into the safety of women-only places.

In the weeks before today's C.R. group (and before I read Goldberg's article), two trans male-to-female people emailed me to ask if they could sign up for the lesbian HERstory group.  My answer:  yes!  If they identity as lesbians, they're welcome in the group.  To say otherwise -- to say, as some radical feminists do (Goldberg mentions Sheila Jeffrey), that a person who is biologically male still benefits from our society's male privilege and so cannot participate in meaningful feminist dialogue -- is to imitate what has so often been done to us as lesbians.  I think trans people in lesbian spaces deepen the kinds of conversation we can have.  Return to what Monique Wittig said in the early 1980s:  "I am not a woman, I am a lesbian."  If someone genuinely identifies as lesbian, we must open our arms and pull them in.  If we do not, we'll repeat the 1950s rejection of the butch lesbian, the 1960s separation from working women and women of color.

But what if a man emailed me to ask if he could join our lesbian-only group?  Our space today would have felt entirely different.  We wouldn't have talked the way we did.  In an era in which we are encouraged to include everyone so we offend no one, we lesbians still desperately need spaces where we can just be with other lesbians -- not with the bar scene pressure to date, but with a C.R. group ability to comfort, inspire and empower.

In "21 Love Poems," Adrienne Rich wrote, "No one has imagined us."  No one, that is, but each other.  I can think of no better reason to gather, just for awhile, in the same room with each other.

Orange is the New. . . Lesbian?

After I write my 1500 words tonight, I plan to turn on episode 6 of the second season of "Orange is the New Black," that show everyone's watching from Netflix.  I can't imagine you don't know the story (especially if you found my blog because you searched for something "lesbian"), but the short summary is this:  Piper Chapman, a white, prudish, WASPy woman engaged to be married to a man is convicted of drug smuggling nine years earlier -- a crime she committed with and for her lesbian girlfriend, Alex Vause.  Each episode of "Orange" follows Piper through the corrupt and complex system of a maximum-security women's prison.  The show also investigates the stories of other women prisoners, and it holds court on many issues within the culture of a women's prison.

"Orange" also investigates many seldom discussed issues within lesbian culture.  When Piper discovers Alex is in the same prison, the passion she feels for her rekindles (after her anger and hurt fade).  Does this mean Piper was always lesbian, and that her feelings for her fiance, Larry, are false?  Or is it only Alex the person that Piper loves, not all women?  In its list of the show's characters, Wikipedia calls Piper "a bisexual woman," but is she?  Or has society forced her into compulsory heterosexuality?

Sophia Burset, a transgendered woman in prison for credit card fraud, raises questions about what defines a woman.  Formerly a male firefighter, Sophia is easily the most stylish and well-mannered woman in the prison.

Carrie "Big Boo" Black is the "diesel dyke," the butch lesbian who takes pride in her identity as a tough woman with aggressive needs.  Feminism has often wanted to dismiss the butch/femme dichotomy as mimicking patriarchy, but butch women like Big Boo argue that it's a valid identity on its own.

Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren is a lesbian who struggles with mental illness, another issue that is often kept hush-hush in the lesbian community.  She developed an obsession with Piper in Season 1, which introduced some interesting discussion about race and lesbian relationships, too.

Nicky Nichols is a lesbian and a former drug addict, who has been in a relationship with other women in the prison (and competes with Big Boo at one point to see who can get the most women to orgasm).  Her high sex drive and flirtiness challenge the stereotype of the asexual aging lesbian.

Poussey Washington is a comfortably out lesbian who has struggled with acceptance in the greater world (her father, a major in the U.S. Army, was transferred out of Germany because Poussey had a relationship with the base commander's daughter).  She's in love with Tastee, her best friend in prison, though Tastee is adamant about her heterosexuality.

What else?  Mr. Healy, the prison supervisor, is homophobic.  His opinion (and protection of) Piper changes entirely when he suspects her of being lesbian.  Some of the inmates are homophobic for some reason or another, like Pensatuckey's religion, or Miss Claudette's cultural upbringing.  Piper's fiance Larry (and Piper's mother) seem to hold Piper's lesbianism at nearly the same level of criminality as her involvement in a drug ring.  The point:  "Orange" is bringing lesbian culture into the spotlight for the greater world.

Then. . . why do I feel vaguely uncomfortable about my love of the show?  Because one day, in a conversation with another lesbian, I realized that almost everyone -- lesbians included -- has seen "Orange," but few people have read Jeanette Winterson or watched great lesbian films like "Tipping the Velvet" or "Aimee and Jaguar".  "Orange" and Ellen are becoming all people know of lesbians.  We're forgetting Adrienne Rich, Joan Nestle, Virginia Woolf, Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde.  Culturally, we spend more time thinking about how lesbians interact in prison than how lesbians interact in the greater world.  Yikes.

At the top of my flier for the lesbian CR group I'm trying to start in Boulder, I wrote "'Orange is the New Black' isn't all of who we are."

Even though I love "Orange," it's crucial to remember the rest of what being a lesbian means. . .