Cultural Wars Yesterday and Today

We hold our ground, over 2000 AIDS activist from all over the country huddled together between street police on patrol and mounted on horses looking over our heads like we were cattle. Stop the G.O.P. Death Squads; Fund AIDS Health solutions; Silence = Death yelled our signs as we burned George Bush in effigy in front of the Astrodome in Houston Texas.  The event, the 1992 Republican National Convention.  This was before things got hectic.

The horses started moving herding us.  We resisted trying not to move.  The police started swinging their Billy clubs that got us going  

in all directions through the flood lights that suddenly flashed on us.All I could see was an outline of the sea of cops coming for us.  Glad I had kept my camera strap around my neck I held the camera trying to document the scene.  The Seattle contingent got separated I could no longer see my friend Cookie that had just snapped my picture or George the editor of the Seattle Gay News.  So many people from Seattle came here for this to have their voices heard, and I could see none of them now.

It was 1992 a year of successful year for Act Up.  It was the year it became an international campaign sending a contingent just weeks earlier to Amsterdam for the International Conference on AIDs joining in on several demonstrations and conference sessions.  Act up representatives met with President Bill Clinton to discuss his AIDS policies and he agrees to make a major AIDS policy speech and have people with HIV speak to the Democratic Convention.  These victories seemed over shadowed by the chaos in the streets now here in Houston as we desperately launched a campaign to “Vote as If Your Life Depended On It.”

Where was the straight press?  Was the world going to see how ACT Up demonstrators who were unarmed were getting clobbered in the streets.  No, they were inside the convention covering Patrick Buchanan as he declares there is a cultural war taking place for the soul of America denouncing the Democratic Party as the one that supports abortion, radical feminism and the homosexual rights movement.  He accused Clinton’s agenda of imposing abortion on demand, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, and forcing women into combat.  Buchanan claims this is not the kind of change America wants.

Pat Buchanan’s open declaration of the cultural wars unleashed the right into a fight that up until then smoldered in all the corners of society. This cultural war created lines drawn by social issues down the middle of America.  Did this division of America start in 1992 or did start on the evening of Aug. 26, 1968, as people were getting arrested in Chicago for a dubious crime of protesting a political event, the Democratic Convention?  If this cultural divide started in the 60’s over the Vietnam war, or even in 1992 we sure didn’t think it would be raging years later.

 “The fight for the soul of America,” has become the battle cry of both sides in the cultural war today as we continue in combat.  Trump’s tweets yell the loudest in this battle over the soul of America, revealing what the cultural wars are all about.  Congress woman, Ilhan Omar, wrote in a recent op-ed in the New York Times about people at a Trump rally chanting, “Send her Back;” “The president’s rally will be a defining moment in American history. It reminds us of the grave stakes of the coming presidential election: that this fight is not merely about policy ideas; it is a fight for the soul of our nation. The ideals at the heart of our founding — equal protection under the law, pluralism, religious liberty — are under attack, and it is up to all of us to defend them.”

Congress woman Omar and the other squad of four, all women of color who are elected officials and have been outspoken pushing progressive ideas and being attacked for them.  “Progressive,” has become a dirty word on talk shows like Morning Joe, networks like Fox News, making moderates look nervous that this country may even think of socialist ideas.  We need to address the short falls of a capitalist system that undermines the Declaration of Independence which declares that all of us have a right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness". The pursuit of happiness is defined as a fundamental right to freely pursue joy and live life in a way that makes you happy, as long as you don't do anything illegal or violate the rights of others.  Capitalism has a different agenda.  Think about how we reconcile this discrepancy when you vote in 2020.

Loving Adventure

Getting ready to bicycle Yugoslavia in 1975, a woman I did housework for on Bainbridge Island lent me “Full Tilt.”  The book chronicles Dervla Murphy’s solo bicycle ride from Ireland to India in 1963 on a three speed.  By the time I read the book I bicycled across Canada, Seattle to San Francisco, Maui in Hawaii, and all around the Pacific Northwest.  Dervla Murphy has been a role model  I did this trip solo as I did a most   of my trips and enjoyed every minute of it.I plan bicycle trips for fun, once a bicycle trip gets mapped out it goes in the bucket list. At 69 years old I still plan to do some solo bicycle touring. Looking back at all my adventures traveling solo as a woman I could tell you a lot of stories but will share a few so you get the general idea.

for me from the first read of “Full Tilt.” Several years ago, I packed up my bicycle and went to Italy.

 Bicycling solo down the Adriatic Sea shore in Yugoslavia, two American men came up behind me on their bicycles.  We exchanged travel stories of our trips. They had decided to go up in the mountains.  The ride for them didn’t sound pleasant.  The roads wand around and up and down, going into one lane now and again and there were not a lot of places to stay.  One night they got robbed.  My story was a happy story.  Staying in campgrounds, I started early in the day to escape the August heat, In the afternoons I’d swim in the Adriatic Sea to cool down and relax. Once hearing my story, the men started making nasty remarks about me traveling alone and saying traveling for women alone is dangerous and inappropriate.  To get away from them, I said I was stopping for a break, they were scaring me with some of their comments.

Let’s face it “Adventure” in films and books in general is about and for men. I think the impact of this media stereo type particularly for men like I met in Yugoslavia discourages women from venturing out, pushing their adventure stories into obscurity and therefore men don’t see women as peers when comes to travel, adventure and a physical challenge. Somehow in my early days I rejected this stereo type.  Today I’m grateful that I did and thank women like Dervla Murphy who have gone before me to set an example to emulate.  In modern times there’s “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed and it seems that things are changing in adventure stereo types little by little.

Adventures like Yugoslavia, started my exploring obscure places far from the tourist hot spots like Vietnam in 1996.  Places like these bring adventure to traveling.  I remember a night in Yugoslavia when I got a bed for the night in a room in a boarding house with four Yugoslavian women.  Luckily, I was able to bring my bicycle up to the room.  The bicycle captured the curiosity of the Yugoslavian women. We kept trying to communicate. They knew a little German from the war, I only knew English.  After a lot of pointing at my bicycle, gesturing, trying to make our signals understood we started to laugh until we settled down for the night. 

Travelers are definitely looking for something, new experiences, new places, seeing great historical places, or experiencing different cultures and meeting new people.  In my travels I often wonder what I’m looking for.   When I think about this, I don’t like to just go somewhere; I want to meet people become part of the day to day life of the area I’m traveling in.  This has been particularly true since I’ve retired. Serving in the Peace Corps, studying in Thailand for four months and walking the Camino de Santiago fulfilled my desires more than any other travel I’ve done.

Traveling in retirement keeps my bucket list growing.  Meeting Dervla was one bucket list item that has been added.  I wrote her a letter.  I wrote in the letter how she inspired me over the years to keep exploring and asked her to have tea with me if I came to Ireland.  The only address I could find was her publisher, to date I have not received a reply. Meeting Dervla will have to stay on the bucket list for now until I can figure out a way to go to Ireland and knock on her door.  Perhaps a bicycle ride to her town.  Until then I’ll plan and dream of bicycling adventures like Spokane, WA to Nelson, BC, Georgia to Armenia, along Danube River from Progue to Budapest, or Southern England to just name a few of them.  Ride on!

The Year of Pride 2019

Gay Pride Day, has come and gone and so has Pride month but this year, 2019, the 50^th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, Pride celebration continues all year, all over the world.  Vashon Heritage Museum joins this worldwide celebration with their current LGBTQ exhibit entitled, “In and Out, Being LGBTQ on Vashon.”  The exhibit plans events throughout the year celebrating Vashon’s LGBTQ’s community.

As part of this yearlong celebration the exhibit, Vashon Heritage Museum and the Senior Center is sponsoring a film series at the Vashon Theater and Senior Center.  The first film, After Stonewall, was shown June 24^th.  As a member of the Advisory Committee for the LGBTQ exhibit I was asked to introduce the film.  Being a conciseness person, I reviewed the movie which I hadn’t seen in years. Watching the film, I was struck by how much the movie moved me even today, not only about my past but about my community’s past.  The movie tells the story of the LGBTQ community’s coming out echoing the coming out stories in the “In and Out” exhibit and the stories I’ve heard over the years, not only from people, but communities and organizations too.

These memories were sparked during my work on the “In and Out” exhibit.  Oral histories of LGBTQ members in our Vashon community are part of this exhibit and are on display for all the community to hear. Listening to them I learned stories about people I have known for years. Stories that have gotten buried with years of living.  The “In and Out” exhibit mined so much history for all us to hear, see and enjoy. History, that seemed forgotten or lost, shines through

The exhibit and the film After Stonewall makes the point that coming out is a life time endeavor.  Thinking about my recent walk on the Camino de Santiago in this context I realize that every time I talked about my “spouse” and people assumed she was a he I had to make the choice of coming out or not coming out.  I did come out to the close group of friends that I consistently walked with for the 486 miles but not everyone I met.  I’ve been out for over 40 years and still I make this choice almost every time I meet some one for the first time.

Seeing After Stonewall brought up memories of some of the significant coming out moments in my live time. At Green Peace as the bookkeeper letting my follow coworkers know that my partner was a woman, or the time when I got pregnant through alternative insemination and had a woman partner answering the question over and over again of how I got pregnant.  Or the time after 16 years of being with my partner having asked my family ask how long we’d been together as if we had just gotten together. Somehow, they didn’t remember her from all those times I brought “My Friend,” to family gatherings.  Then my I brought “My Partner” to family gatherings.  All these identities my partner and I took on over the years depending on what we perceived as acceptable were stages in our coming out process. 

Even our children go through these processes of coming out.  My daughter when she starts to date a new person asks if they have a problem with her having gay parents.  As she put it, “This is a deal breaker if they have a problem with it.” Actually, when I think about it, my whole family goes through a coming out process.  Years ago, my sister gave a chunk of change to the Pride Foundation.  I found out about it because she had a postcard on her refrigerator from the Pride Foundation and to my surprise it had my faster daughter’s photograph on the front.  I asked her where she got the postcard and that’s when she told me about her contribution.  To me having this postcard on her refrigerator was a message to all my her friends that she accepts her gay sister and identifies as a “Gay Ali.”

These stories of members of my community and my family are ripples in the years of my community’s coming out story that extends way beyond any closet I ever dreamed of when I first told the first person that I was a lesbian.  These stories continue today and I am reminded coming out is a life time endeavor.  And as the LGBTQ community continues to spread love as a good thing, I think of the words from the poem, “The River Gold.” written by a Vashon gay man, Don Paulson where he refers to the strength of our community as a lovely stream, “Who would think a lovely stream could sweeten a bitter sea.”  Thank you, Vashon Heritage Museum, for coming out as an Ali of the Vashon Gay Community.

For events celebrating the LGBTQ community look on the Vashon Heritage Museum’s website at; https://vashonheritagemuseum.org/