Month: March 2017

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Obama and Gay Centurions and Death, by Louis Brown

I have three interpretations of “Leaving”: (a) Evaluation of Barak Obama’s presidency; Barack Obama will soon be leaving office; (b) Louis Brown leaves New York City from which he recalls another fond memory; (c) Leaving as dying: death of brother, Charles Brown.

(a) President Barack Obama: I voted for him twice. He talks like an enlightened liberal person, but, when the chips are down, he reacts like a hostile right-wing Republican. He went to Flint, Michigan, and spoke to a roomful of black students and told them, “I have your backs.” The facts do not really bear this out. His EPA knew all along that the governor of Michigan was poisoning the people of Flint but did nothing to interfere. His administration did nothing to get the governor of Michigan impeached and removed from office. Mr. Obama, like a bellicose right-wing Republican, continues to wage a perpetual war in Afghanistan, despite the widespread opposition of the American public. When Scott Walker was stripping union workers in Wisconsin of their labor rights, Mr. Obama was silent, breaking with the long history of the Democratic Party advocating for the rights of working people. Au contraire, Mr. Obama promotes TPP which is very hostile to the interests of American working people. So, despite some of his good qualities, Mr. Obama is just another failure in a long line of failed presidents.

(b) Louis Brown leaves New York City: one of my fondest memories of New York City was viewing for the past 3 years in June at the Gay Pride March the Alcazar Night Club float. This consisted of a large truck with a large dance floor platform on which around 15 very tall brawny beautiful Hispanic men, dressed up as Roman Centurions; they performed a rather wild and frenetic and yet very well-rehearsed, disco-style dance routine, accompanied by very loud disco music. The spectacular performance was not pornographic but was very suggestive and very erotic. Imagine, a loud boisterous display of male on male eroticism in public on a sundrenched day in June. I later thought that I should have videotaped the event so that, when asked why I recommend putting Classical Studies in gay and Lesbian studies curriculums, I would show these Hispanic gays evoking ancient Rome. They did a good job in expressing gay pride and making a naughty historical reference. Remember, if you want your minority group to promote a sense of community, and to empower itself, you have to learn its history – so taught Alex Haley, author of Roots. Amen.

(c) Leaving meaning dying: My brother Charles Brown died in 1999 at the age of 52. One of my friends told me he observed that my brother would stay a little too long at night at a local Irish bar in the nearby town of Flushing, New York, and would imbibe too many Martini’s, Manhattans and Bloody Mary’s. That is what killed him. Charlie Brown was thin, and soft-spoken and gay. He worked at a good job at the 42nd Street Library. He had several different boyfriends, but one long-term boyfriend, Pat Marra, was unusually good-looking. He was quite tall, had beautifully formed hands and dark wavy brown hair. He looked like a DaVinci painting. He was so beautiful he reminded me of my Italian teacher, il signor Guido, another unusually gorgeous Italian. I remember even the heterosexual male students in that Italian class were flabbergasted when they looked at him. To accentuate his good looks, he wore very expensive Italian silk suits and stylishly elegant Italian shoes. That was Italian 101. Everyone in the class was looking forward to Italian 102, but, at the end of the semester, Mr. Guido returned to Italy. Boohoo.

Two points to make, my brother Charlie died of alcohol abuse, and his boyfriend, Pat Marra, died of an illegal narcotic overdose, either heroin or cocaine, I forget which. Question, how could the gay community have intervened in their lives to prevent substance abuse? What was missing in their lives?

© 2 November 2016

About the Author

I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA’s. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.

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My Fault, by Jude Gassaway

You can see my fault from outer space.

Of the two big islands in the Gulf of California, Tiburon is the one closest to the Mexican mainland. Seen from above, the northeastern lobe shows a sharp line heading northwest, delineating lighter ground to the north. That straight line is my fault.

Air photo, Tiburon Island (Google Maps)

     In the winter of 1972, just as the subject of plate tectonics was getting started, another student and I were assigned to map the northeast end of Tiburon Island for our Graduate Field Geology class at San Diego State University.
     
     The week before, while mapping on the mainland, we met a pair of Wycliffe Bible translators, whose mission was to bring the word of God to native people. The Religious’ approach was to identify, define, and transcribe the local vernacular, and then translate the Bible into the new language. Here, they focused on the Seri Tribe.

     In Punta Chueca, I met a Seri man who wanted to demonstrate his new reading skills. He had a lesson pamphlet with everyday words in English, Spanish, and Seri. I remember two of the words because of their similarity.
     

A few Seri place names on our base map included oddities like Sierra “Kunkaak” and the multi-hyphenated Punta “Ast-Ho-Ben-O-Glap”.

Our professor, in the course of drafting the geologic map and interpreting the history, had to name and describe the geologic observations. The fault in my field area was just a bit off-kilter to the then-known regional picture. It needed a name so that its geologic significance could be discussed in the text. There were no place names in the fault valley.

I was unaware of the professor’s solution until the map was published several years later. The professor told me that he had noticed that I thought differently and that I often veered off to a little bit away from the others, just as this fault wandered. (As the only woman in the class, sometimes I moved away just to relieve myself.) Then, he thought, “yawassag” –that sounded kind of like a Seri word. And thus, Yawassag Fault was named. Jude Gassaway.

Gastil. R.G., and Krummenacher, Daniel, 1975, Reconnaissance geologic map of coastal of coastal Sonora between Puerto Lobos and Bahia Kino, Geological Society of America, map and Chart Series, MC-16.

  © 2017

About the Author

Retired USGS Field Geologist.
Founding member, Denver Womens Chorus. 
Jude Gassaway is the figure on the left.
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Blue Skies, by Gillian

Blue skies smiling at me; nothing but blue skies do I see.

Well for God’s sake, how boring is that? Sure, we welcome blue skies because they signal a clear sunny day ahead. We use them metaphorically in the same way. But the fact is that clear blue skies are not interesting. They do not fascinate us the way cloudy skies do. We don’t have different names for different parts of a blue sky, the way we talk of cirrus and cumulonimbus clouds.

I belong …. wait for it, you’re going to love this …. to The Cloud Appreciation Society. Weird cloud photographers from all around the world post cloud photos and videos to the website, and so many of them are breathtakingly beautiful. I myself have, in my computer, something over 500 photos of nothing but clouds, or those taken primarily because of the cloud formations they capture. In only one of the whole collection is there a clear blue sky.

A while ago, I put together a small booklet of my own sky photos, accompanied by appropriate quotations, because the sky, to me, is too beautiful not to be accompanied by poetic appreciation. As the Cloud Appreciation Society says it –

‘ … (clouds) are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.’

And, I would add, you don’t have to risk life and limb to watch them, unlike so many of nature’s more dramatic displays.

The same website also reminds us, in its somewhat tongue-in-cheek ‘manifesto’, that we should fight what it calls ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it. Life, they say, would indeed be dull if we had to look up at a cloudless monotony day after day. It is, of course, a whole lot easier to espouse that philosophy living in a place like Colorado than in the many cities in this country which receive over 60″ of rain per year, and have little opportunity to grow bored with clear blue skies.

And there are endless quotes exhorting us to appreciate those metaphorical clouds in our lives, in order that we might fully appreciate the blue skies when they return. Quite honestly, I’m not totally convinced. I suspect this may be a tactical encouragement towards positive thinking of, and response to, the inevitable. Did I really need to break my wrist in order to appreciate my fully-functioning joints? Must I suffer from that miserable Xmas cold to value my usual good health? I don’t think so. But I couldn’t help myself; I had to see what that WWW had to offer.

There are, need I say, many comments on the topic. Two I really liked.

The first said,

‘One can appreciate the Good in Life without experiencing the Bad

However, when one experiences the Bad

That which was not quite so Good becomes Good

and the Good we experience radiates a stronger energy than before…’

The other said,

‘…. experiencing bad would definitely allow you to appreciate the good more then you previously have. But if you were raised with the right values to already do all that then you wouldn’t necessarily need the bad in your life.’

Points to ponder.

But I return to that ‘manifesto’ of the Cloud Society, which ends with the final, simpler, injunction,

‘…. always remember to live life with your head in the clouds!’

© June 2016

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.