Dyke Pride

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

There are plenty of lesbians who think we're on the way up. They're "out". They fit in, and feel like they're just a hairsbreadth away from getting their props in society. They'll take the legislature over the streets any day. But for the rest of us desperate for a voice and face, there's still the Dyke March.

We meet at Bryant Park at 5 the Saturday before the LGBT Pride Parade. Things start off slow because organizers don't ask for a permit, and there's always the show of a negotiation with the cops before we really get going. In a lesbian catechism, one dyke screams, "Whose streets?" And the celebrating faithful respond, "Our streets!" Until eventually they are.

Even if there's no other message -- and admittedly the signs are sometimes in short supply -- that single message is enough. Because we're taking not just any streets, but the fabled Fifth Avenue in New York City where you don't just shop, you parade. New York has dozens, and lesbians have as much right to the pavement as any of them, the Irish Hibernians and the Puerto Ricans, Hindus, Captive Nations. In fact, we are them, if you give us a closer look, which hardly anybody does.

Eighteen years after the Lesbian Avengers kicked off the first march, even a couple thousand dykes in one place rarely gets a line in the local press. We're like the inverse of unicorns which are often mentioned, rarely seen.

Let me quote my girlfriend, and declare, "We could disappear and who'd notice we'd gone?" Disapparate lesbians, and American culture at large would lose what? One talk show host, a cable news commentator, a reality TV show, and digging deeper, a couple of grrrrl bands, the school's gym teacher, and those two mommies down the block.

You'll see Latinos and African Americans in Woody Allen movies before you'll see dykes (except for Ellen) on network TV. Forget the movies, except maybe as a punch line. Music's not much better. Where's the second Melissa Etheridge? Or even a dyke writer under fifty? Where is the next Audre Lorde?

I don't think I'm so out of touch I'd miss a young dyke busting out, a Sarah Schulman or Jeanette Winterson, Sapphire, or Adrienne Rich. Are they even possible anymore since somebody opened the pressure cooker just that tiny little bit giving us a few token rights, role models you can count on one hand? Is a lesbian identity necessary? Is visibility? Do we need a community at all?

The Dyke March answers with a resounding yes. Besides the thousands of us in New York, there's the enormous Dyke March in San Francisco, and others in Toronto, and Portland, Boston, Chicago, and Phillie, and here and there in the South and Southwest. Plenty appear one year, disappear the next, and reappear later on.

This year, by the time we were several blocks in, where the Church Ladies for Choice serenaded marchers with the message, "God is a lesbian," our numbers had swelled to several thousand. I saw a lot of young dykes of color that probably identify with our few role models even less than me, and know why they're there in the street.

One young woman told me she'd been there every year since she was old enough. And when I asked her why, said, "Because I have to be. We're not equal yet."

There was another reason, too, that you could see in her face, and the faces of the other young women she was marching with -- joy. We don't mention it much. It's the kind of thing that gets erased in the debate about same-sex marriage and gays serving the flag. Like the idea of liberation, it disappears like the words lesbian and gay when assimilationist organizations like Equality Now choose their names.

And while equality has its clear and essential benefits, you can smell the omnipresent danger of being subsumed into the nice white middle-class heterosexual ideal in which we're all separated into couples, stuck in ticky-tacky suburban houses, and banal, insupportable lives. I want equality under the law, but so much more. I want to exist. I want to claim a few miles there in the center of my goddamn city with several thousand of my ilk.

Better yet, I want to build a lesbian golem to stamp through the universe of society's heterosexual imagination, where if we surface at all, it's still as porn. Or ridiculous maidens. We are mostly dust invisible in the corner. It would be better if we scraped it together and made a monster of it. Leave trails of muddy footprints, broken buildings, graffiti, scraps of paper with the words, "truth," "love," maybe "joy" scribbled on them.

Health Care, Black Holes and Baby Dykes

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

The world might be coming to an end. Not just because the Large Hadron Collider is back in action, or was, accelerating particles in 17 miles of track and potentially generating teensy-weensy black holes capable of swallowing up the earth in a single gulp, but because Obama actually got that health care reform bill passed.

I'd jump up and down and throw a party except I'm still a little miffed at whoever's bright idea it was to get fence-sitting Democrats on board by promising an Executive Order banning federal funding of abortion health care services. Keep the pompoms in the closet when poor women are getting screwed again.

Then there's the ongoing stranglehold of insurance companies brought in to lobby from the very start behind closed White House doors. I haven't forgotten that either. But as they say, better something than nothing in terms of health reform. It's a start. Things can be improved later. Though this Pablum would be considerably more believable if the Democrats had a backbone made of steel, rather than Silly Putty.

If I'm satisfied at all it's because a defeat would have given the Tea Party folks a whomping burst of momentum and shoved the Obama administration even further into the quicksand of caution and bipartisanship (cowardice, endless concessions) pretty much dooming to failure all his promises of change. I never really believed them, but what the heck? I can hope with the best of them.

What has impressed me lately is how in the midst of the hoo-ha about health care reform, the rest of the Obama administration managed to function at all. There were two wars to think about, Israel to chide, and they actually negotiated a treaty with Russia to reduce nukes. Obama will probably face much bigger hurdles than the ex-commies when it comes to getting the treaty approved. Right-wing Democrats and Republican politicians will no doubt continue to say No to everything like a bunch of terrible two-year-olds with a load in their pants.

I was also surprised to see Obama make a foray to Afghanistan to twist Hamid Karzai's arm in person. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Clinton visited Mexico with half the U.S. government in tow to show a commitment to a state that's been brought practically to its knees by the drug wars. So yes, I'm glad health care reform passed, giving a little oomph to Obama instead of the hateful Tea Party mob, and showing folks his administration can take care of business. If they want to. Or if they're forced into a corner where they have to bare their little rat teeth.

Which raises the question of just what exactly queers would have to do to see some progress on any federal front like Don't Ask Don't Tell or the Defense of Marriage Act. Have a cappuccino or maybe Molotov cocktail party? Stage demonstrations where we foam from the mouth and all behave badly?

Our national organizations don't seem to cut it, especially compared to individual baby dykes in southern states. In Alabama in 2009, Tharptown High School student Cynthia Stewart successfully fought to bring her girlfriend to prom. The school initially decided to cancel its event, but reversed their decision after Stewart's case made headlines.

Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi followed suit, canceling its prom rather than allowing Constance McMillen to wear a tuxedo and arrive with her girlfriend, Ashli Pass, who also goes to Itawamba. Just afterwards McMillen told the Clarion-Ledger: "That's really messed up because the message they are sending is that if they have to let gay people go to prom that they are not going to have one." If only they would do that with marriage.

McMillen was tempted not to return to school because she was afraid everyone was going to hate her, but her family came through. "My daddy told me that I needed to show them that I am still proud of who I am. I want other kids to know that it's not right for schools to do that."

She went to court backed by the ACLU, and last week federal Judge Glen H. Davidson ruled that McMillen’s constitutional rights had been violated. He didn't force the school to hold a prom because parents are organizing one everyone can attend.

While she probably would have preferred a quicker resolution, it's been great seeing McMillen appear in photos with her family and girlfriend. The new faces of lesbian visibility are mighty cute. And if proms are what spur change in the South, I say more power to them.

It's not abstractions like equal rights that get under the skin of most people and force them to act. It's wanting to be like everybody else. Go to proms, get married. There's room for a more radical agenda, but interesting things often start small. With random collisions. Then big bangs.