A Night at Dante's

After a day of wind and rain squalls, La Professora and I made our way to Dante's pub-cafe, a gathering place for an eccentric mix of devotees. On this night I was to be part of the Melbourne book launch for a collection of photographs--by Del LaGrace Volcano-- and text--by Ulrika Dahl-- about an international community of women who define as femme. I want to share with you my contribution to this moving and at times powerful event.



March 14, 2009

Thank you Liz and Ulrika for inviting me to be part of this evening.



My words tonight, this expression of my fem power, grew out of the courage of the young fem-butch, trans people, lesbian-feminist people, peace and gender queer activists, Palestinian and Israeli, with whom I spoke in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem two years ago. Out of the courage of Rauda Marcos, one of the founders of ASWAT, the Palestinian Lesbian Organization, who fights for the lives of all her peoples on so many fronts. Out of the words of Sonya of Australian Women for Palestine who lead me to the poetry and life of Mahmoud Darwish, the revered Palestinian poet who died at age 67 on August 11, 2008 in exile and who lived his life labeled "a present-absent alien" by the Israeli government. I will carry his words on this femme body for the rest of my life.



From my journal, June 22, 2007

Our friends in Haifa made us see with their eyes and so we saw through landscapes to deeper histories. When we first travelled the roads between Tel Aviv and Haifa, our eyes fell off the scrub hills, but Hannah asked us to look again. "See those prickly pear cactuses"--and she slowed the car down so we could focus our gaze--"Every time you see a cluster of them, you are looking at the ruins of a Palestinian home. The farmers used the plant to form natural corrals for their grazing animals and also ate the fruit born at the tip of the rounded leaf." We started to look deeper, longer, and soon we could see the tracings of another people, not a long gone people,but a recently displaced people. Stone foundations started to appear, buried in the surviving scrub. May you all have friends who make you look again. But when you see, there is no return to blankness, to cruel triumphalism.



The Poet: "Ah, the country where we see only what is not seen; our secret/We travel like other people but we return to nowhere...We have a country of words. Speak speak so I can put my road on the stone of a stone. We have a country of words. Speak speak so we may know the end of this travel.





Dear Poet, how did I find you, through dusty roads of unknown histories, you whose words live on so many tongues and yet I was so ignorant of the love you poured into your differently metered lines, of your swirling solid notes of exile, of the white mare that runs down into the valleys no longer safe, that drinks from your fathers' wells, now empty of their sense of self. I came as a stranger, a Jewish femme stranger into your cadences of loss and exultation, into your Andalusian sunsets and endless stony roads that lead to children carrying fathers on their backs, to endless journeys past familiar olive trees but with no rest allowed, no fruit given.



The Poet: " (to the killers) If you'd contemplate the victim's face/and thought, you would have remembered your mother in the gas chamber/ you would have liberated yourself from the rifle's wisdom/and changed your mind; this isn't how identity is reclaimed."



I stood in front of the gray looming wall that divided life from life, that marked the loss of history for one people and the loss of a soul for another. That impenetrable wall, with its razor wire far above us, froze my queer fem body. And that is why I am here tonight. For many years, I have written, mapped, tracked the power of my fem desire, the strength of my thighs to grip the wanted body and shake it loose of its hard places, to offer my fullness of desire and flesh as a way through, as a break in the wall, as a yearning that refuses solid borders and policed boundaries. I have reveled in the thrust of penetration, the opening in the wall; I have been a port of entry, a simple thing, a taking in, an offered warmth, a way in, a break in the wall. In other writings I have charted how desire for a certain kind of touch can push a woman off the map. And on that bare sandy road in East Jerusalem facing the wall's brutal solidity, I had the inkling of a fem politic, something beyond my earlier years' celebration of the fem-butch courage that walked the hate-filled streets of Joseph McCarthy's America. How does a fem face history, how does my body, always the speaker of my desires, confront the atrophies of national compassion that so mark our world. A port of entry, a simple thing, a taking in, an opening in the wall. Over ruins so huge they threaten to block out all hope, your words find me. I have tasted your heat, seen the olive trees in exile, decorative in the gardens of the usurpers. What a strange two the world would think us, a 50s fem from the Bronx, the dying poet who lives in every Palestinian heart--but the only way I can live in a world now where such a wall exists is to take your words into my mouth.



The Poet: "I am my language. I am what the words said: Be my body. Be the crossroads between my body and the eternal desert...there is no land to carry me above the earth so my speech carries me.



This is my language, collars of stars around the necks of lovers, my steps are of wind and sand/ my world is my body and what my hands possess/I am the traveller and the path.



The poem is what lies between a between. It is able to illuminate the night with the breasts of a young woman/it is able to illuminate, with an apple, two bodies/it is able to restore/ with the cry of a gardenia, A Homeland.



In Jerusalem and I mean within the ancient walls, I walk from one epoch to another without a memory to guide me...I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: how do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone? Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?... I think to myself, alone the prophet Mohamed spoke classical Arabic--'And then what? Then what?' a woman soldier shouted: Is that you again? Didn't I kill you?' I said: you killed me...and I forgot, like you, to die."



At the end of the two hour talk at the University of Tel Aviv, a group of fem women came up to talk with me about the difficulties they faced, the judgements from all sides that accompanied their lives. As they spoke and I comforted I saw their beauty. That night we spent in the Jerusalem home of one of the founders of Women in Black in Israel, the following day we stood vigil in the heart of the city--Gila took us through the streets, crossing over into East Jerusalem, traveling along the wall surrounding Bethlehem, stopping at the checkpoint controlling Palestinian entry and departures from their own land, and finally into the hectic histories of the old city. A long hard day. In the evening another communal sharing of food. Many of the young people who had been present at the Queer sexuality talk had made their way to Gila's house. Feeling a little tired, I sat in a chair in the backyard, taking in the scents of the warm night air, the sounds of Jerusalem, and one by one the students and their friends came to sit around me. They wanted stories of the body, these young queer peace makers, wanted tales of how we survived the bigotries of another time, how we found each other and tried to imagine another world. We leaned into each other and again I saw the beauty of the unarmed human body, their hopes for another kind of future held in their bare arms. "Come back to us," one of the young femme women said, "when the occupation is over."



Selected Books by Mahmoud Darwish

Why Did You Leave the Horses Alone? Trans. by Jeffrey Sacks, 2006.

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Trans. by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche, 2003.

Memory for Forgetfulness. August, Beirut, 1982. Trans. Ibrahim Muhawi, 1995.

The Butterfly's Burden. Trans. by Fady Joudah, 2007.

Ice and Fire

This afternoon my friend Pattie was on her hands and knees hooking up my new computer; thank you, my dear friend. We are back from the cold of New York, back in Victoria where the bush has exploded, where drought turns all to tinder and people die trying to save their homes, their children, their friends. So much has happened since last we spoke--the unspeakable war crimes committed against the people of Gaza, but speak we must and I will; Obama's inauguration and now the reality of his realpolitik; the archives' 35th birthday celebration at the Gay Center in Manhattan and the welcoming moments at the new Staten Island Gay Center--and friends, friends, dear New York friends--talking over bagels at Tal's, endless breakfasts at the City Dinner, my morning salon and the long talk with Nancy at the restaurant facing snow covered Central Park, walking the fashion district and so much more with Karin, in from Copenhagen, her new manuscript under her arm and then Liz and Bobbi, flying in from Tucson, dearest friends for so many years now and the gathering at Jonathan's on a snowy night in the Village so others could catch up with Liz and Bobbi--Allen's presence hovering us, this small reunion of the first generation of gay historians and archivists--when it was over, we poured out of Jonathan's brownstone like a bubbling mob of literary comrades--snow still falling, the street lamps throwing their yellow light on the snow covered sidewalks, helping each other down the slick street, into a new time and an old taxi.

Thank you all who have written comments in my absence--Paul and my old friend Roz and all the others and to Shebar who keeps this site going.

Two Months in New York

We have been in New York since December 1 and will return to Melbourne on February 2, 2009. I write to you from a small mailing storefront on Broadway on the upper West side that is staffed by three young Egyptian men with whom I share my print outs calling us to demonstrate against the Israeli war on the trapped people of Gaza. My time at the computer is short--and I will write about the fullness of our time here when once again, the silences of Fitzgibbon Avenue replace the roar of life I have found once again on my old streets. To all who have found their way to my words in this world of so many words, thank you.

Old friend

Thank you, Lee, dear old friend. I am sorry I do not know how to respond to comments in a more private way -so forgive this shared moment. You and I and so many others of the "old" times are the lucky ones--we have lived long enough to see great changes and to have a deep sense of what still must happen, not just for queer people but for all, on all the continents of our sad earth who cannot fully lift their heads.

Far from the streets of San Francisco, I saw a small Congolese boy, his eyes wide with terror, his small body trembling, eyes so wide with loss and fear, he could not blink, staring into the camera of the British news gatherer while another reporter, kneeling before the barefoot boy held the child's small hand in his own. So still his hand, his young young life almost at a standstill--he had lost his parents as they all fled for their lives from the approaching gun men. His eyes looking out at us, at me, sitting in my chair, safe. Oh dear child, oh dear boy, what have we done to you, to all the children who duck or swerve or huddle--their newly lived bodies shattered by our failures. I will not forget your eyes, the trembling of your limbs, the hand without will, lost lost in an exploding world. May you find your way home, dear boy. And we must never stop seeing all of you.

But Sadnesses as Well

All day I have been thinking about this new time in the world but as the day wore on, and I listened to American commentators all dismissing the votes against Gay marriage as just the same pesty, unimportant issue, I grew angry--not at Obama, but at a nation willing to scapegoat one community--here we will show our intolerance and it is ok, here we will take an unbending stand on a morality issue, and it is ok, here we will show Obama's win was "not ideological," the commentators kept saying over and over. I thought of Mabel Hampton and all the other Black gay people I know and have known who wanted all their human selves to be justly treated, and of all of us queer people who worked hard to change this country, while so many in the country were willing to write off our rights as citizens of this same country. We have become the expendable community--I have no desire to involve the state in my relationships with anyone--but I think of Marie and her partner, celebrating their marriage for the short time they had, coming home from their ceremony to find hate literature against their union on their doorstep. Hugeness of national insult impedes the national dream of a just society. We will not stop haunting this country and others until queer people walk national streets in safety and are given the same rights as all others to conduct their family lives as they desire. Obama named us as part of this nation, calling us into being in that Chicago night; our struggle continues as we continue to give gifts to our nations.

How Long the Journey--How Deep the Victory

Mabel Hampton and her wife, Lillian Foster, c. 1950s

In an old Melbourne pub with Democrats Abroad, watching the returns, 2008

On a bright lit morning, I sit gathering in all the words of embodied hope, the pure joy of having lived long enough to see this day, yes, Obama, yes, to the best of America, yes to the courage of a people who never stopped pushing at the ugly barriers of racial restrictions, who did not not let state violence on so many levels, expressed in a myriad of soul crunching ways, deter them

from their path of resistance, yes to all of us who struggled to make our country another kind of place--and I know all of you who knew Mabel Hampton know that this was the day she lived for, and that she must be with us today. Oh what a man, she would say, my what a man!

Di, Daniel, Joel, Mitch, Declan and I joined over 200 ex-pat Americans crammed into a 19th century Melbourne pub named for a famous Maori Chief to join Democrats Abroad for a day of election returns watching. Far from Times Square, we were found ourselves, exiles from California, Rhode Island, Florida, New Jersey and New York in this small corner of the world, screaming our hearts out every time the numbers changed in our man's favor. I was far from the old school gymnasium on 92nd street on the Upper West Side where I had voted for over 30 years, far from what many consider the center of the world, sitting with new Australian friends whom I had dragged into my history--which now is all of our histories.

We pulled the shades over the windows to block out the full morning sun as we watched that American night so far away, drawn together by our isolation and our need to focus on the screen, to see through separation into the real heart of things, a people reclaiming a national dream made up of many histories and one desire--the return of a political and national dignity

for all of us.

Throughout the hours, I sat taking in the Australianess of this American night--the big glasses of beer, the endless platters of fish and chips cooked pub style, nothing fancy and plenty more chips then fish. We were a group of what they call the "battlers" here, plain people, a little lost perhaps, some wearing funny American hats, others, older, like myself, sitting hour after hour, hardly breathing at times, friends traipsing down the stairs to bring back lemon/lime and bitters so we would not have to fight our way down the old staircase.

There were other gatherings around town, we found out, in the higher priced sections of town where you needed an invitation to get in--but not at the Maori Chief. Everyone was welcomed and little by little all three floors of the old place filled up, heads turned up to TV screens that usually were dedicated to the soft tones of test cricket or the quick moving displays of physical courage known as Aussie Rules Footy. Soon the tv cameras showed up to document this strange gathering of fans of another kind. A room of strangers except for our place of birth gradually became an island of political intimacy, knees touching knees, arms around each other's chairs, new friends shouting drinks for each other--no one got drunk and lemonade as well as beer flowed freely--heads turning to each other to ask what did they say--our voices drowning out the CNN endless talking, to ask did he get Florida yet--and then some remembering together about that famous night when we went to sleep thinking Gore had won Florida to discover the country had been stolen over night--not this night, not this our day.

Finally, as I was speaking to Marge on the phone, the whole room rose as one, arms upstretched, cheers so loud I could hear nothing--that little square of numbers had reached the magic number and one version of the past had died and Chicago, once the scene of a red-necked nation turning on its own youth, filled the screen, thousands of Americans with so many histories, turning to the new one being born. You were there Mabel and Lillian, you and your communities all over this country had brought this night, our day, into being.