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.

Now is the Time

Now is the time--memories must wait, for now we have the end of a present and the beginning of a future in our hands. Now is the time for us to declare what kind of America we will be--there is hatred in the air, there is fear of new thinking on public policies, there is a desire for a simplistic national myth--the "real " American, gun in hand--a simplistic economic myth--prop up the banks and the market economy will right itself, fight more and more wars, invade more and more countries and America will be safe--BUT there is another air to breath, where not too much is very simple--people are loosing their jobs and their homes in huge numbers even while the banks soak up dollar after dollar of redistributed wealth--from us to them, where we take responsibility for our international actions and begin to understand how we author hatred-Millions it seems have found this oxygen of hope; now if one more vote can be squeezed out for Obama, let's find it--if one more cynical non voter can be pulled into the conversation, then pull, pull. In our window here on Fitzgibbon Avenue, I have put up downloaded Obama signs--and the would-be bumper sticker, Another Jew for Obama. Lonely, they look out at an Australian street, the face of another nation's dilemma, but they are my contribution to the blooming bottle brushes and kangaroo paws, my own flowers of a brave national dreaming that have accompanied me across the oceans.

Nancy's Visit in My Dream Time--2

Nancy Johnson's Poster for LHA, "Mary Jane Taylor: Friend of Mabel Hampton, 1930,"/In Memory of the Voices We Have Lost/Enjai Graphics, 1980

Death takes away people's lives so quickly, friends whom we assume are getting on with their lives and then the word comes, "Nancy Johnson died in Sweden." So many years later. I knew she had been doing healing work overseas, in the northern countries. Then a packet of photographs left at LHA from Dinah, the few fragments of our friendship. And last night, after not sleeping well and after weeks of not feeling well, in my early morning sleep, Nancy enters a large almost empty house, I am sitting in my chair--and she drags suitcases by me, "aren't you going to help me?" and feeling immediately guilty, I leap up and follow her out the door, determined to lighten her load, but it is too late. The next moment Nancy is lying on a pallet, close to death, a cancer death, and I am bending tightly over her, seeing the toll so much has taken on her--her face, pinched and wide eyed, almost touches mine. Here in Australia, into the early morning I see my old friend when I did not see her, in her extremity, this woman who had struggled to rescue so many, now I see in her depleted need. And I think of how many times she needed to be relieved of her burdens and I was not there.

And all day she has been with me. All the Nancys I knew--her laugh, her belief that some divine spirits can walk above the earth, her pitching in to cook for mobs in the New Hope kitchens, her body, large breasted and slim waisted, with whom she did not always feel at home, her scars from too much of one thing and not enough of others--her determination to take on her "missions," her love of her sisters and their children, of her own found children. Her down home turn of a phrase. I remember the visit, in the 70s I think, I made with Nancy and Dinah to Salt Lake City to meet their families or what remained of them.

Nancy speaking of her childhood, what she had to flee from and her rage at a cousin who sat me up on one of his palomino horses, an under- exercised horse bursting with life, and let it run wild with me on a race track--a massive animal power under me, muscles bursting out from oaten skin, a hundred times I almost died, my whole body thrown over the horse's shoulders--but somehow the man had had his fun and caught up with us and slowed his vibrant animal down. I can still remember the terror in my thighs as I willed myself not to let go, not to fall head over head under the animal's hoofs. Perhaps he was showing this New York gal what real life was like. And the vet, who held Nancy's cat by the scuff of his neck, as he slashed the abscess open--"never met a Jew," before he said. The extreme domesticity of her mother's life, the doilies, the cakes, the cookies, the never ending cooking, the thick limbs from hard work. From Selma, Alabama to the Lower East Side of New York, from the first walk the three of us took together as I showed them the gay Village, to the doors of the old Firehouse on Wooster Street, through the thick organizing years of the 70s and early 80s, to the streets of Parkslope and Nancy and Dinah's rough hewn apartment with the sleeping loft, so dangerous in its own way, through all the years passing down until this morning in West Brunswick, Melbourne, Australia.

I once extolled the gift of touch, and I still do--Nancy layed on hands to ease the human heart and now far from old friends, and through the motes of memories, I cherish her. When I saw that image of Nancy, the one you have seen, with her arm around me, and heard of her death, I knew both that all the years of separation were real and yet there I was, back on 9th street, sitting at the round wooden table listening to Nancy, her long legs tucked under her, telling me tales of the West and the hopes she had for their sojourn in the East. This journal, my writing, means nothing if it does not keep alive those human spirits who in their courage and difference, in their play and their visions, in their touch and in their stumbles, brought all the wonders of life to me.