Julie R. Enszer's Blog, page 15

Sliding Scale

The implementation of a sliding scale may be one of the great contributions of lesbian-feminism. The concept is simple: people have different amounts of money, particularly disposable income. The products of lesbian-feminism have value that is not necessarily fixed by capital markets. The value of things produced by lesbian-feminism is variable and the price may be set differently by different women. Enter the sliding scale. It is a recommended range of payment determined by individual women to participate in events or activities or to purchase different goods and services. 

Flyers from the 1970s and 1980s carry the words, “More if you can, less if you can’t,” next to the recommended donation, price, or cost of admission. The notion of the sliding scale is an active negotiation between the values of lesbian-feminism and capitalism. It recognizes that we live in a capitalist system, that individuals have different resources, and that lesbian-feminist projects need resources. The solution is not perfect, but it is thoughtful and workable. It mobilizes resources from women to support lesbian-feminist projects.

Sinister Wisdom is one of these projects from the sliding scale era. The journal implements it through hardship subscriptions. Women can subscribe to Sinister Wisdom for as little as $10 for a year-long subscription. That is the less if you can’t component of the equation. Ten dollars covers a little less than half the actual expense to print and mail four copies of the journal to a subscriber. Other women subsidize the journal with their regular subscriptions and with charitable donations. That is the more if you can component of the equation. Guess what? It works.

Today I opened the Sinister Wisdom mail, and there were two checks. One for $20 for a two year subscription; one for $500. It feels pretty magical to see those two checks together and to understand how lesbian-feminist visions work in the real world. Today, I also learned that women around the world have donated enough to make a downpayment on the land of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Featival. Do not listen when people say that lesbians cannot mobilize resources for community projects. Lesbian have financial resources and they give them generously to projects, ideas, dreams, visions, and realities that they support. We have power and we use it. With a sliding scale. To benefit one another.

[image error]

An issue of Lesbian Connection from 1978. See the bottom of the image for the ubiquitous “more if you can, less if you can’t”.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Pardon

We are approaching the one year anniversary of Tibe’s trial and conviction. I have been thinking about justice and restoration in a variety of octaves. Part of these reflections come from watching Sundance’s series, Rectify. It is an extraordinary southern gothic about a young man convicted of murder at eighteen and sentenced to death, then eighteen or twenty years later the conviction is overthrown by new DNA evidence. Daniel returns to the world outside. It is an extraordinarily compelling series. I loved it and yet I critique it as well. It is designed for me, a white woman, to feel sympathy for a white man effected by mass incarceration, which is to say it elides the very serious questions about race and our prison systems. Still. I loved the series.

[image error]

As an aside, one of the things that I love about Rectify is the portrayal of Tawney Talbot. Tawney’s devotion to god and Christianity feels foreign to me, even uncomfortable. I am more comfortable with Amantha and that attorney who represents Daniel (pictured above); they feel like people I know. Tawney (pictured below) feels like someone I do not know, but her humanity is so powerful in the series. It reminds me that even if we do not agree with people, we have to see the humanity in one another. 

[image error]

I have also been thinking about justice and restoration in relation to the appeals for the pardon of Ethel Rosenberg. Initiated by her two sons, the Rosenberg Fund for Children is petitioning President Obama to pardon Ethel before he leaves office. I hope he does. I wrote a personal email to him asking him to review the case and take action. It seems clear that Ethel did not participate in a way to deserve the death penalty. I hope that this injustice of our past can be rectified. I do not know if it will be.

And Tibe? One of the unfortunate things about our inadequate legal representation and the animal control process is that Tibe carries a conviction that has no mechanism to expire or be overturned. There is no path for Tibe to emerge from this county sanction. He is forbidden, forever, from the entire county in Marlyand. It seems even more ludicrous as I type it a year later. I have thought about writing to President Obama and asking him to pardon Tibe; he pardons turkeys after all. Certainly the President should have that power. Yet I know he would respond that Tibe’s conviction is outside his jurisdiction. So there is no hope for a pardon for Tibe. I am holding out hope for Ethel, and grappling with the ideas of justice, forgiveness, and how we can find and live inside wholeness.

[image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error]

Filed under: Uncategorized

Shame

When I turn over the coin of rage, I come to shame. They are the same currency. There is a world of shame that I carry about the entire Tibe situation, but lately I am thinking about my own shameful behavior of doubting lesbians, of not believing their experiences of bullying and shunning. Being the crazy woman who lays down her whole life for a dog, being the crazy woman on the other side of homophobic bullies and bigots, just occupying the simple space of a crazy woman at midlife causes one to reflect on the other crazy women. What I thought of them.

When I was young, in my twenties, there were women and men whose lives I looked at and I thought I understood. I thought I knew something of their struggles, their challenges. Now, I like at twenty-somethings with their looks of empathy and I want to go back in time and slap myself. I cannot, of course. But I remember and the shame appears.

I remember one woman in their forties, probably my age now, but my age then: in her forties in the early 1990s. She was a butch lesbian. The kind of butch lesbian I love. The details of this story are fuzzy to me; it was over twenty-five years ago, but I remember she had a job in social work and things were going well. She was a hard worker and caring and kind and compassionate, but something happened. A new boss, I seem to recall, and suddenly the whole job seemed to slip beyond her control and soon she was unemployed. The thing we all know, me, her, and everyone around her is that she had been targeted by a boss who was a bigot. She lost her job because of the thing that I loved about her most: her open, butch lesbianism. And this of course was perfectly legal and there was nothing that really could be done about it. And we all looked on with horror and disbelief and helplessness. And here is the source of my shame: I remember thinking, I am different from her, such a tragedy will never befall me, it could not happen to me, I am more careful, less blatant, I fit in, I do not rock the boat, I am safe, I am protected. I am different.

Though of course I am not. And twenty-five years later, something similar happened to me: a situation with some bigots got out of control and everything was perfectly legal, but suddenly we lost our home because we would not out down our beautiful dog to mollify the bullies. And around us were people thinking: I am safe, I am protected, I am different. I hate those people as I am sure this wonderful butch woman must have hated me twenty-five years ago.

This is how shame works, I think. That which we deny when we are younger, we see again when we cannot escape the inevitable truth. Over the past few months, I think again and again, I must find this woman and apologize. Though I imagine an apology would shock her. It is only in my heart that I thought, I am different. Only in my mind that I doubted the seriousness of her experience, the sharpness of her pain, the veracity of her truth. Yet those private expressions are enough to fill me with shame.

I want to apologize; I want to make myself whole through repentance. Mostly though I want to go back, rewind and erase these thoughts. I want to see and hear her from the truth that I now know at forty-six: the world is happy to bully lesbians, deny our humanity, make meaningless our lives.

This circular awareness and the weather today in Brooklyn reminds me of this song by Ferron.

I thank you your letters though they come to me slowly

I hear the city’s in a panic with its first foot of snow

I want to answer you quickly having read you again

‘Cause it sounds like you’re dancing 

with time’s favorite friend

And it’s everyone’s secret and muttered refrain

That for all of our trouble we be lonely again

I cannot go back and redo this life, but I take comfort in Ferron, for all of our trouble we be lonely again.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Rage

Rage rears her head at interesting times. Today it was the Facebook year in review video. Yes, I watched what Facebook extracted from my yearly posts, but no I will not share it. I refuse to turn this craptastic year into some saccharine sweet video that suggests I have good memories of it. This year was horrible. We were driven from our home by bigots and bullies and unable to return because our dog was banned from the county where we owned a home. I cannot normalize that and package it into a year of memories.

The election results also stirred up the rage inside me from the events of last year. In many ways, I consider Tibe and our experience with him and our neighborhood to be a harbinger of the Trump era. If Trump is a bully who gets his way, we saw the effects of bullies on our lives last year and earlier this year: we lost our home and our sense of safety in the world; we learned how vulnerable we are to the angry mob, how isolated we are as lesbians, how few people spoke up for us, and what the consequences are of now bowing to the angry mob of bullies.

And I am still enraged about it. I know that for my own mental health, I am to let go of the anger, let go of the rage. I know it hurts me and has no effect on the bullies. I understand all of that, but it does not change my feelings. I continue to be enraged, and there is little that I can do about it.

So given that rage makes these appearances and I cannot banish her, given that I am not courting rage and yet she still appears, I want to observe rage and understand her contours. Efforts to deny her, to gloss over her, to apply frosting to cover her up (even delicious fondant, which I could eat day and night) only exacerbate her. I learned that from the Facebook video. Trump winning seemed to reanimate the rage, but it also exposed her cousin: shadenfreude.

I know as much as I am supposed to let go of anger, I am not to embrace schadenfreude; I am not to delight in the misfortunes of others. But, let me whisper here, I do. The bigots and bullies who drove us from our home? Many of them work for the federal government. One works for the Justice Department (oh, the rich irony there) and another for EPA. Can I tell you, still whispering here, how delighted I am that they will be working for Jeff Sessions and Scott Pruitt? Yes, we are all screwed by these appointments, but I hope the pain is especially palpable for the bullies in our neighborhood. I hope they labor for years in misery. I hope the bites in their skin by the republicans are deep and cutting and long-lasting. I hope they suffer in ways they had never imagined. Yes, the bigots and bullies now work for bigots and bullies. Everyone gets what they deserve. And Tibe? Tibe lives.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Skin

The nurse who visits my grandmother every two weeks texts me that her skin is in excellent condition. It has been a long road to achieving that result and I know it may be temporary. At this time last year, she had terrible skin on her ankles and lower calves. Her ankles itched and she scratched them until they bled. Then the rash of unknown origin spread to her arms, around her neck and even on her back. For two or three months, we could not even address the skin issues: her other medical conditions were more pressing. Last May, we made our way to the Dematologist and I made a commitment that I would get her skin healed before I left Saginaw.

It was more challenging than I imagined. First, the dermatologist asserted her belief that “this is just something that happens to old women.” Perhaps, but I was not going to just let it happen to this old woman. Then, the complications of the treatment for the skin issues: medical and human. One part of the solution is thick support hose for my grandma’s legs. They are difficult to put on and difficult to get off, meaning, she cannot strip them off and itch. That is, until they are too old and become somewhat saggy and baggy. Then she can role them down and scratch. This is a human problem. Another part of the solution is regular lotion, all over her body. Getting her oiled down properly and regularly is also a challenge. The men and women who care for her sometimes have other priorities; she cannot remember to apply the dope herself. This is another human problem. The real thing that clears the skin is prednisone, which raises her blood sugars. This is a medical problem.

For the moment though, things are in balance. Her skin is clear. She doesn’t itch. Achieving this stasis makes it more likely to maintain this stasis. Just as the itching is a vicious cycle, so is not itching. So when the nurse texted me that her skin looked excellent. I was happy. It was a long journey to get us to that point. The only thing that tempered my happiness is the persistent question: what about all of the other old women with skin irritations? Who would bulldog doctors and caregivers to heal their skin?

I am at a conference about racism and racial healing in Carlsbad, CA. Those questions haunt me. I know how to heal my grandmother–one woman, but I can make no guarantees for the rest. I feel similarly about racism these days. I can recognize individual strategies to arrest racism, but I cannot see or imagine the institutional, the systemic changes. I am happy for my grandmother’s clear skin, but I still think about other old women with eczema of unknown origin. How much they must itch, how their skin weeps and bleeds. How few help them, how few hope for healing.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Ferron is Why I Love Butch Women

The Ferron concert last week was extraordinary. Not just being in a small venue of about one hundred and seventy people, not just hearing Ferron reprise some of classic songs, not just being in a room full of lesbians, what really struck me about the evening was the humanity that Ferron embodies and how I understand that humanity through Ferron’s butchness. On one level, butchness is a performance, a physical display of particular markers. Ferron occupies these markers with grace and ease: dungarees, a pressed button down shirt, a wallet stuffed in a back pocket, comfortable, flat shoes, close cropped hair. She walked on the stage and there was the butch-appearing woman that I fell in love with years ago at The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

Yet, butchness is more than physical presentation. It is the combination of determination and self-surety with vulnerability, the knowledge and deployment of vulnerability. Ferron displayed these characteristics as well. The determination and self-surety almost seem like attributes of any performer, but there is something uniquely butch in them as well. Ferron performed with Barbara Higbie as a special guest; both had the grit and determination of long time performers, but the femme Higbie exuded warmth and comfort along with her grit and determination. Ferron, certainly warm and comforting, mutes these in her butch way; the focus is on her power, on her slight transgression of gendered norms to occupy the stage as openly lesbian, openly butch, defiant and certain of herself within that defiance. That defiance is paired with the necessary vulnerability. Ferron reflects it openly these days: references to arthritis impairing her ability to play the guitar for long periods of time and sharing the necessarily vulnerability of performing songs in front of audiences, not all as warmly embracing as the lesbian audience that night. These simultaneously independent and conflicting mental spaces: determination and vulnerability seem crucial to my apprehension of butchness, my appreciation of butchness.

Ferron was not the first butch woman that I saw. The late eighties were littered with them. Of course, the late teens are as well. Ferron was the first butch woman that I felt intimately connected to through her songs. It was like she was lying next to me with the walkperson tethered to me through earphones. First a cassette player as I gingerly handled that dubbed tape, fearful that it would rip or unwind and I would lose the voice of this butch lesbian friend; then the portable CD player, that would release such heat after repeated replays. These small mechanical devices facilitated intimacy between me and Ferron. In many ways, given all of the hours we lay together, she was my first butch lover.

All of the things I love about butchness, refined over the years of real, actual, embodied lovers, continue to be embodied in Ferron: strength, power, strong fashion sense, humor, vulnerability, beauty, truth, speech, sound. I saw them all up on stage listening to Ferron. I returned home to all of them in the beloved. There is much to love and celebrate about butch women. Nearly thirty years ago, Ferron taught me that, last week she reminded me of these truths.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Setting the Radio Stations in the Car

We did not choose Florida. Nor did Florida choose us. We landed here because of the vagaries of corporate capitalism: where does it make sense to local employees in a global economy? Though we had some input into whee we might build a life and have jobs, the arrival to Florida feels more random, accidental, even happenstance.

Do not get me wrong, I embrace Florida. I was thrilled to have postcards made for moving and new business cards made to facilitate mail correspondence. In spite of these actions, I think that I have been a bit in denial about Florida. Here? For the foreseeable future? Even forever? If feels odd.

Yet, here we are. Seeking and finding dog sitters and doctors and places to repair the broken lamp switch. There are a million things to do after a move and a million and one things necessary to feel acclimated. I cannot even count the things necessary to feeel at home. That transformation will happen in our future; when is unknown.

Setting permanent radio stations in my car has not been a necessity. Until last night. Generally, my driving trips are short: the post office, the dry cleaner, the grocery, small errands. I listen mainly to NPR. I’ll be honest; NPR accounts for ninety percent of my radio listening. So setting radio stations was not a priority. Last night however driving home from the Ferron concert in Gulfport, it was jazz night on NPR and I am not a jazz fan, especially not driving at night after a Ferron concert. And the challenge in Florida with just hitting scan on the radio is after NPR and the classical station, you fall into an abyss of a million and one religious stations. I am not exaggerating. Hence the station presets feel important. They save me from the religion scan that can last for five minutes.

But there are a lot of stations and it takes some time to find the right one for each of the nine presets. Slot one is for NPR and slot nine is for the classical station. I want one top 40s station and one classic rock. There are at least five of each of these; how do I find the best one? I want one country station without the religious inflection or the right wing politics; that will take some more hours of listening to find. I want one hip hop station. The beloved likes a weather and traffic station; when I find one that may get a preset. I would love to find a great folk station and some type of alternative station as well. While it is easy to program the station, the labor of listening and selecting, of sampling and curating is the challenge. I programmed six stations driving home last night. I have three more slots to fill. I am not sure I have the right country or hip hop station; I even wonder if I have the best top 40s station, but for now, I have stations to flip through in my car for my next long drive. So it is not quite home yet but the soundtrack of our lives is starting to sing from the dashboard.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Filling the Well

One of the pleasures of this past weekend was long and meandering conversations with two good friends of mine. We talked a lot about life and death and the end of life and how we imagine it might end, how we want it to end, how we do not want it to end. Both of my friends have lost their fathers in the past two years. Both are engaged with mothers in some type of assisted living arrangement. We talked of dementia and how the mind ages. We talked of our own aging bodies. 

When I was in my twenties, I dated a woman in her forties. I suppose it was, at the time, somewhat scandalous. I suppose some would say, Mommy Issues. It worked for a period of a few years. I liked her. I liked the sex we had together. I liked her friends. In retrospect, one of the things I learned from her was about what life is like in one’s forties. I learned more about loss and the middle struggles. What I did not learn was about how in middle age life just seems to pile it on sometimes. Set backs, even tragedies, seemed more singular in my twenties. Not getting a particular job, various disappointments in trying to pursue different career paths, even losing my sister, all seemed to be discrete incidents. Moments for mourning and licking the wounds of disappointments. Still only moments. At this age, life seems to pile it on: lose your mother, don’t get jobs, lose your home, be thrown into care work for your grandmother, watch a nut bar be elected. There are no longer singular moments of pain and difficulty, but many and they all bleed together, amplifying one another.

Part of this is probably complexity and the awareness of complexity. In my twenties, I rarely though, if I do this, then I cannot do this. I think that way often today. Similarly, I think, if I do this, this might happen and that might no happen and I weigh those options. I am starting to think this is what middle age is. Life piling it on.

I am hoping that old age is dissipation after all of this accretion. It will be a welcome change. One of my friends is like me in this moment of life just piling it on relentlessly with little pleasure. In one of our long and meandering conversations, I asked her, what are you doing to fill the well. The question sent my head spinning as I tried to answer it for myself. What am I doing to fill the well?

Here is my list of well-filling activities:

Traveling. Small trips, yes, but traveling a bit for work, combining bits of work with bits of pleasure, visiting old friends and new. That fills the well.
Reading capaciously. Lesbian novels from the entire twentieth century. Narrative non-fiction. Biography. Poetry. Essays. I am dipping in and out of about ten books at the moment and loving it.
Dreaming. I am starting to imagine new projects. Big ones. Hairy ones. For the past year, I though my work was to simply wrap up things I had started. Yes, things must be complete, but filling the well requires new dreams.
Scheming. A central question of my life has been how do we mobilize resources to support the lesbians. I continue to scheme about how to do just that.
Supporting the dreams and schemes of others. Little bits of money here and there to support the dreams and schemes of other folks, help fill my own well. I have been planting those seeds.
Sitting in the cold, wearing warm sweaters. I may be living in Florida, but I am a Michigan girl and I like these cool evenings in the low fifties that require wool socks and soft sweaters.
Watching it rain and walking in the rain. There was a good soaking rain in San Francisco this weekend. We did not take a long walk, but it felt good to have rain on my face, in my hair. The well does not fill by dumping buckets into it; the ground around it must be soaked for water to run down and then be pumped up.

What are you doing to fill the well?

Filed under: Uncategorized

Lesbian Spirit and Imagination

It is late in San Francisco and even later in Florida, but I am staying up to write this quick love letter to my beloved lesbian community. My mind and my spirit are full after this trip. Part of it is the extraordinary love and care and support of my hosts here in San Francisco. They have shuttled me all around the city and the east bay doing Sinister Wisdom work and shared great food, great conversations, and great company with me.

Part of it is the extraordinary afternoon yesterday at the San Francisco Public Library celebrating The Complete Works of Pat Parker. Ellen Gierson organized an extraordinary event and I was so happy to be here, to experience it and to play a part in having Parker’s work back in print in the world.

Part of it is checking my email after two full days of lesbian spirit and imagination and finding wonderful emails from new supporters of Sinister Wisdom. The beloved lesbian community is stepping up and supporting Sinister Wisdom at a time our bank account was a bit depleted and at a time where our spirits our challenged. I am grateful to all of the women who are giving generously to Sinister Wisdom. If you have not given yet to the oldest lesbian-feminist magazine, make a gift today and treat yourself to a year of great lesbian art and literature and expressions of lesbian imagination. If you have given, thank you for lifting up Sinister Wisdom and for reminding me of the value of this work in the world. I see you and honor you. Thank you.

This is me in my hosts’ home. They have th iconic Sinister Wisdom Poster framed and guess what! They gifted this poster to me!

Women performing “Movement in Black” on Saturday at the San Francisco Public Library.

Intrepid event organizer Ellen Gierson at the event at the library.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Pat Parker

Come celebrate Pat Parker at the San Francisco Public Library on Saturday at 1 pm!

Filed under: Uncategorized