La Parola

a morality play with beer and a lie

Whatever happened to you? I remember our last visit well. In fact, I never forgot it. Would our friendship have turned out any differently if I had told the truth?

I was just reading an early Stegner short story, “The Glass Mountain”. This is about two college chums who got together for a short visit after seventeen years. One of them was a successful scientist or academic of some sort. The other was a lush, already slurring his words and repeating himself. The visit was awkward, and nothing that needed to be said really got said, and their reunion was mercifully brief.

I remembered that you called in about 1976 to say you were in the area. Did I have time? Well, sure. How long had it been, five years? Certainly not seventeen, thank goodness - I was still not making new friendships or reviving old ones, even by 1988. I don’t remember exactly what seemed so likeable about that person you visited in 1976, and I don’t miss him any more than you do.

When you called on that Saturday morning I was badly hung over - and when was I not? But what could I say? You were over in an hour. It certainly was good to see my old best friend and college chum again, but I repeat myself. What could I say? My life - my island universe as it was then - was all caught up in flying lessons, density altitudes, retail management, beer, scotch, wine, grass, fast motorcycles and braggadocio, all descriptive of my exciting life, in any order you like.

And of course my world was filled with people who knew all about this and heard more every day. There was never anything to explain. There was never anyone to ask, “do you still read any philosophy” or “what did you end up doing with your business degree after you graduated?”

Until you arrived, these weren’t questions I would even entertain by myself. I was working, life was good, and it was filled with adventures and partying and the passage of time and the mandatory morning hangovers.

So I must have seemed uncomfortable while we visited. Worse, maybe I masked my discomfort too well and seemed indifferent.

I felt bad about that, but what could I do? There was hardly any point to thrilling you for hour upon beer-soaked hour with my tales of flying and backpacking and motorcycle trips. This brave new world of mine was light-years removed from anything we had shared together in the old college days. Imagine me dumb-struck, I who always had all the answers for everything, and if I didn’t, there was a reason for that too.

How could I, who never ran out of things to say about any subject no matter how narrow, find nothing I could say about this new life of mine?

You told me a bit about yourself and it embarrasses me to this day - I can’t remember a thing of it. I think you were thinking of going east. I heard later that you had done so, and settled down to raise a family in some eastern seaboard state. You said that your mom had incurable breast cancer and that saddened me. She had always treated me like a prince, as if some of my good qualities might rub off on her boys, I had always been fond of her. Seeing as how an unforgiveably mean stunt I had pulled made me persona non grata in the family, it didn’t seem appropriate to ask if I could see her - what could I say?

I asked if you’d care for a beer, and I forget whether you said “beer” or “coke”. I was relieved to be able to pop the quick first and second of the day. You asked if I was dating, a clever way of putting it, I thought, and I always had a snappy one-liner for such probings. I used it.

So then you remembered you had indeed meant to ask me something - you surprised me by mentioning that your brother thought he might be gay.

Back in college, you recalled, I had been sorting through similar feelings of my own.

Where we had mercifully left off that subject in college, I’d confided that the thing for me to do was to focus on girls, and maybe start dating.

And so, since your brother seemed to be going through the same process, what had ever become of that? Did I ever sort through my issues?

I confess it took me a minute. I looked you straight in the eye and said, “He’s just going through a phase. He’ll get over it. I did.”

Wishful thinking? If I wasn’t exactly sure this was a lie before you asked, I certainly was sure it by the time I said it.

Somehow, at that exact moment you realized it was time to leave. I grabbed another beer from the fridge and saw you off.

Although I never saw you again, I always wished you well, and was glad to hear you were doing well. We were so close in college. Maybe you knew me too well for my own good, and I, not well enough.

It would take me another thirteen years to “sort through my issues”. It’s a shame our last visit didn’t go better. But what could I - or, for that matter, anyone in my position - say? If anyone could fake it, I (who hated fakery) should have been able to. I had become the lie.

That’s just not the sort of thing you look forward sharing with people who know we deserve better.

and he will be missed by many.

Here at La Parola, home of Talking Crow Productions, we have long watched scientists with interest as they try to discover whether crows and ravens are as clever as they seem, particularly since this is yet another area where the crows are not forthcoming and the scientists have to stretch their own powers of observation to deduce what pretty much everybody else knows.

So, we enjoyed an entertaining article on crows and ravens in the April 2007 Scientific American, “Just How Smart Are Ravens?” (Bernd Heinrich and Thomas Bugnyar, p.64. The full text of the article is not available online.)

The article described experiments in considerable detail that suggest that the genus corvus (crows and ravens) possess formidable “reasoning” power in learning new adaptive skills. Without having been taught, or wasting time on repetitive trial and error, corvus uses logical or “reasoning” skills for problem solving. The authors felt that these skill levels may even surpass the better documented abilities of the great apes.

Not only are these birds clever, they are socially gregarious and exploit their powers of observation to selectively communicate with others, or hide information from them (where did he hide his food cache?) The birds even use play skills to manipulate dangerous larger predators such as wolves into sharing their food kills.

Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell

Once again, our big disappointment was that no attention was paid to how crows and ravens communicate with each other through calls, or to whether or not they possess the power of speech. Metaphorically at least, once could say that no one thought to ask the crows, preferring the backdoor approach of devising tests to determine whether the crows really knew what they know. And, as always, it appears that the crows simply weren’t talking.

La Parola is proud to host an inquiry into rights that’s universally applicable to everybody.

MYTH: One of the most common myths in civilization is that rights are conditional, so the big argument is only who gets to decide who gets what rights.

BUSTED. You can see that this debate had been raging for 4,000 years, or maybe 40,000, depending on how long your historical perspective is. But you can also see that any distinction between “rights” and “privileges” evaporates when we get bogged down in debates over who gets to “define” rights.

–> Read the complete Article

In my earlier article of October 25 2005 on this topic, I concluded:

In conclusion: “In general, what rights does the Act provide for Domestic Partners?”

Nobody knows exactly what rights and responsibilities we do have, including us.

This is just a followup to share what I have experienced so far. It’s not pretty. My partner Bob passed away a few days after that article was posted. We ran out of time and never formed a Trust. As executor of his estate, a number of incidents have provided a rude awakening to what domestic partners might expect in the current civil rights climate.

For domestic partners, it would seem the most practical course of action (when possible) is to treat the cancelation of the old service completely separate from resuming coverage as a new customer. However, we often need 100% continuous service and I have no good advice here. I have not tackled the phone companies that were in Bob’s name, as I need for those numbers to remain the same. Switching carriers and taking the old number with me is probably the way to go.

I suspect that in most cases the underlying problem is both a mix of employee attitudes and confusion in corporate legal departments as to exactly what is expected of them - if anything. The California law is only of the very most limited utility when doing business in the state, and outside of California, both your domestic partnership status and any filing you may have are utterly worthless. If you were thinking that businesses will do almost anything to retain our business, think again. Most of the ones I have dealt with would seem just as happy if I would just go away.

Phoenix, Saturday morning …

1. The desert landscaping drip irrigation system sprang yet another leak. I found and fixed it in less than an hour.
2. No hot water this morning. Found the number for the plumber. Then found and reset 30A circuit breaker. Hot water heater works fine.
3. There are 10 different bird sounds in the back yard. I only recognize the starling and grackle. Must learn another one for 2006.
4. I saw a star last night in cloudy Phoenix. All right, it was only one, and I don’t know which star. But that’s one more than folks in the cloudy SF Bay Area saw. Hoping for two, tonight.
5. The weeds are starting to flourish. This confirms the rains Phoenix supposedly gets when I’m away. Time to pull the weeds.
6. Dust storms?even get past the?garage door, and the car is dusty. I know how to fix this.
7. The pool is clearer than I’ve ever seen it, and even the skimmer vacuum is tracing its rounds on the pool bottom. I’m not adjusting anything. Nothing for me to do.
8. It’s sunny and mid-60’s. Feels like mid-sixties. No, it feels like Spring! Nothing to complain about here!
9. I miss Bob, but somewhere I think he is watching me do all my chores and saying, “See, I told you so!”
10. In a world filled with war, hatred and intolerance, you may be asking?how we can talk of weeding when there is?real?suffering and injustice. Au contraire,?when we?stop valuing the mundane concerns typified by items 1-9, where has the purpose of the struggle gone? Live your life each day as best as you know how, not as a “model” for others, but as a model for yourself and those closest to you. The rest of the world will catch up, but it always keeps its own timetable.

Seattle civil rights activists have asked their elected officials to change the law to allow same-sex partners to marry. This parallels pioneering efforts in San Francisco, New York, Portland, and the state of Massachusetts - not to mention entire countries in Europe which now bless same-sex couples with the same civil liberties as everyone else.

Legal strategies in the United States are homing in on an inescapable fact, one which makes neoconservatives uncomfortable. In the United States, the law denies same-sex couples the same civil liberties as everyone else.

Rather than paraphrase the news, I will excerpt from the article by Wyatt Buchanan in today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered city officials to marry same-sex couples -- a defiant act two years ago that soon was emulated in Portland, Ore., and New Paltz, N.Y. -- gay rights supporters in Seattle demanded that their elected officials do the same.

Instead, King County Executive Ron Sims placed an unusual phone call.

"He said, 'I don't want to break the law. Will you please sue me to strike down the law?' " said Lisa M. Stone, executive director of the Northwest Women's Law Center. "That's not a call we get very often."

"The cases present constitutional issues that judges haven't thought about a great deal yet," said Matt Coles, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project. "It's not just the narrow issue of marriage but how you think about laws that discriminate against gay people under the equal protection clause, how you think about what a fundamental right is.

La Parola didn’t invent the concepts of equal protection and the universality of civil liberties. But we have been saying for years that same-sex couples have been denied the same constitutional protections that other Americans take for granted.

It isn’t about what America feels like “sanctioning” or approving, though America has a 200+ year track record of clinging to the popular idea that your constitutional rights can be subordinated to popular approval. That’s right: in order for you to exercise a constitutional right, you may have to wait and see when - if ever - a committee of your friends and neighbors ratifies that right for everyone, or just for themselves.

In the past, this precedence of inconsistency seemed to excuse the many politically active religious groups who campaigned agressively to deny fundamental liberties to others, such as same-sex couples.

The Constitution says the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, but when the citizens of the good City of San Francisco vote to ban handguns, listen to these same partisans scream!

I and my partner of fifteen years had always wanted to obtain a marriage license. It wasn’t a matter of commitment - our partnership was already a devoted lifetime commitment. It was a matter of respect, dignity, and equal protection under the law. We thought of Amsterdam, or groundbreaking San Francisco. A marriage that gets shot down in the courts is denigrating. And, what were we to do: get married in ten different localities, in the hope that one would survive court challenges?

My partner Bob Sibley died last year, after a long battle with cancer. I will always regret that, in his lifetime, he never saw equality and recognition in our nation, or even in our state, for a domestic home life that was always the same for every day of our fifteen years together: a commitment to the household, and to each other, forever.

How many lifetimes will it take?

Those who think that civil rights aren’t a right, but a privilege that can be revoked or denied, better not complain about their Second Amendment rights, or wave the flag or the great Constitution in our faces. Those who are unable or unwilling to defend the rights of others haven’t really forfeited anyone’s rights, even their own.

What they have forfeited is their own credibility whenever they try to selectively defend some rights and deny others. And they keep good company: this thinking goes all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Heresy? If civil liberties really were a juggling act, in which some parties must do without the rights of full citizenship so that others may take pleasure in theirs more fully, then how are civil liberty guarantees better than just a Soviet-style farce? If that were the case, should we then proclaim that the great American experiment really failed?

In another era, Americans believed in the sacred tenet of “Live and Let Live”, even though we didn’t practice it. Let’s hope for all our sakes we see the light before it’s too late for any of us.

“Brokeback Mountain” is a new and popular film by Ang Lee about two cowboys who become lovers in 1963. Even as they marry and raise families, they continue to see each other and renew their special relationship. While this is a story that needs to be told, this is an altogether too familiar story that could never be told in the anti-queer culture of 1963. Most viewers will be too young to remember “the love that has no name”, those “loves that cannot be”.

From the reviews, I am reasonably sure that this is a movie that will be remembered, one that treats the love of two men with sensitivity and circumspection. No doubt its thoughtfulness will provoke average movie-goers to think more about whatever it is they already think about, if they think about same-sex issues at all.

One could even argue that, lacking the pathetic self-parody stereotypes found in virtually all “gay” contemporary sitcom, “Brokeback Mountain” is a step forward for GLBT cinema and media presentation.

Me, I doubt that I’ll see it. Without benefit of horses or the backdrop of the Wyoming landscape, I lived a considerably more mundane but equally clandestine version of that relationship, many decades ago. So did many others. Yep, pardner, I lived it. Uh-huh. Don’t never want to go back, neither.

If you read these pages regularly, in fact, if you ever read them at all, let us know what you thought of this article, and (if you saw the movie) what you thought of Brokeback Mountain.

My partner Bob and I celebrated our 15th anniversary last Monday. We filed for domestic partnership with the California Secretary of State in June, 2000. Since then, we have taken advantage of a number of benefits with our wonderfully supportive employer, not the least of which was the ability to add Bob to my HMO plan under domestic partner coverage when his health failed and he had to go on disability.

We are no stranger to the health care system, having faced a number of threatening medical issues in the last few years. We notice how often I have to explain why I’m entitled to stay by and visit Bob when in a hospital. Many times, saying “I’m his domestic partner” produces only a blank stare.

Kaiser Permanente is in the forefront of equitable and accessible health care, yet nobody seems to know what to do when a domestic partner arrives on the scene. “Family” works better, and it’s truthful. I have only been denied the ability to stick with Bob in a couple of emergency hospital situations, where the answer “spouse” would have worked. In a medical emergency, we’re more interested in timely attention to Bob, than in proving a point.

We face banking issues, mostly stuff we should have taken care of years ago. I can’t open a joint account with Wells Fargo, where Bob has banked for 25 years or longer, because my own account with Wells Fargo is new, and we haven’t gone the Financial Power of Attorney route. For this Wells Fargo customer, Bob has to come in, presumably, with oxygen and hospital bed and meds.

In short, nobody knows exactly what rights and responsibilities we do have, including us. I researched it a bit. The following is excerpted from a Google html version of the PDF file http://www.ucop.edu/sas/sfs/programs_and_policies/AB205Q&A5a.pdf.

What is the California Domestic Partnership Rights and Responsibilities Act of 2003?

Generally, partners "shall have the same rights, protections, and benefits . . . under law as are granted to . . . spouses." Specifically, partners have rights equal to those of spouses under probate law, employment law, and discrimination law. Public entities are required to extend to Domestic Partners any rights extended to spouses in terms of insurance and retirement benefits and any other employment rights mandated by law.

What I find is that there are specific rights in dealing with CA state entities, and in applying for student financial aid. More general provisions are tied to a governing body of law, The California Family Code.

In short, domestic partners - and all those with whom we deal institutionally - have to be attorneys to argue effectively for a specific right in a specific situation. “Because the California Family Code says so” is a guaranteed show-stopper, if it might have any effect at all. Don’t try it if you’re in a hurry. We, and the folks we deal with, are not equipped to make a legal determination on the spot whether the Act covers a given situation or not. And, of course, none of this is any good at all outside the state of California (we own property in Arizona), even in other states which do support domestic partnership or even same-sex marriage.

In order to mitigate the harm done to same-sex households by feudal reactionaries - who believe that your partnership or marriage is fundamentally a matter of public property and consent - we’ve created a horrible hodgepodge of laws. Some rights are undefinable, some are denied, and some are in hopeless conflict with other laws and other levels of government.

The short-term workaround is for domestic partners to continue dealing with obstacles issue-by-issue, as we have. In our experience, by far most of the people we deal with bend over backwards to be fair.

And, in the long run, the person who is permitted those bedside visits is probably going to be the one paying the bills, and authorizing the treatments, who has already been sitting by that bed for weeks.

You were probably wondering, what is the California Family Code? Here is the currently famous provision:

FAMILY.CODE SECTION 300-310

300. Marriage is a personal relation arising out of a civil
contract between a man and a woman, to which the consent of the
parties capable of making that contract is necessary. Consent alone
does not constitute marriage. Consent must be followed by the
issuance of a license and solemnization as authorized by this
division, except as provided by Section 425 and Part 4 (commencing
with Section 500).

In conclusion: “In general, what rights does the Act provide for Domestic Partners?”

Nobody knows exactly what rights and responsibilities we do have, including us.

Wake up, America. Racism in the Castro needs to be dealt with firmly. It needs to be discussed openly in the gay and straight communities. But when the day is done, we will still have racism in the Castro (and in America) — even if more covertly. When the day is done, our pervasive anti-other attitudes are undermining civil liberty efforts everywhere.

They are among the most maligned groups in society, but when it comes to discrimination, many say, gays can give as good as they get.
A city investigation of S.F. Badlands, one of the largest and most popular bars in the heart of the Castro neighborhood, has added evidence to that argument. In April, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission found that the bar discriminated against African American customers and job applicants.
– Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle staff writer, San Francisco Chronicle Sunday June 26, 2005

Racism in the GLBT community is not new, nor did it originate there. Massive family and cultural ethnic contradictions snake their way from generation to generation, without regard for the ethnic background or sexual orientation of individual members of the adoptive new generation. Racism in the greater communities, in the diverse ethnic and regional groups themselves, has improved since the 1960’s. But the ugly spirit of the KKK festers deep and heals slowly, and it is actively undermining efforts to bring real equality to the gay lesbian community, and other minority communities, today.

Racism in America has lost most of its political clout, meaning, it is now generally illegal to hurt you because of your ethnic origin. But the superstition, ignorance and mean-spiritedness, rooted now more in low-lifers and misguided individuals than in most institutions, is still there. You can say what you want, but victims of this prejudice know it when they see it. And they see it.

No student of history or current events would fail to look at this in the context of the racism and ethnic warfare that has infected and plagued all the regions of the world. Globally, tolerance and understanding has a long way to go.

What we need to understand about racism:

Whether one understands and agrees with this or not, those who continue denigrating other groups on account of race, color, creed, sex, or sexual orientation make a day-to-day choice. And that choice says: “I opt out of any pretense that my civil liberties are justifiable. I’ll hang on to them as long as I can, but I can’t defend them. I choose a posture which says that universal rights are a myth, my rights are indefensible, and I’ll just take what I can get and hope I don’t get caught.”

The next time you hear an associate use the “N” word, or make snide remarks about gay civil unions, speak out. Remind them their civil liberties are at stake too. As go the rights of the least popular minority, so goes the nation.

On this day of San Francisco’s own Gay Pride parade, it’s time to reaffirm the “rainbow” in the Rainbow Flag.