Update: All my postings from December 10 until now are lost forever in the cyber-trash-heap because my web host, Colizer, dumped me without my permission (another story), including my reaction to Obama choosing Rick Warren for the Invocation at the Inauguration. No way can I muster my anger and disappointment about that topic again. Too much has happened since then. I’m in a better mood, for one thing.

Now, an excerpt from “Rattlesnake Momma,” my new novel:

My mother called tonight, she remembered my birthday. I was afraid she had forgotten because she has dementia. Or dementia has her. Take your pick. She’s still living at home because she married one of her husbands for the third time and he’s taking care of her. My heart has been split in half for a year about the situation but now I’m stitching the two halves together again. I can’t afford to lose anyone I love or anyone who loves me. Love is too precious to abandon.

New word: PUNWIT (noun) plural: PUNWITS.

Any combination of a supposed non-biased talking head, pundit, or anchor who creates issues out of the news to give him/her a perch from which to spout nonsense about nothing.

copyright, Dec. 6, 2008.

The sleaze bag known as Saxby Chambliss has won the runoff against Jim Martin in Georgia. I realize we’re in a forgiving time due to our President-Elect, Barack Obama, and I admire him for that, but Chambliss forever will be a sleaze bag and bottom feeder to me because of his campaign against Max Cleland 6 years ago. It was worse than anything we saw during this last election cycle and that’s saying something. On this one, I will hold a grudge! This means, too, that Mitch McConnell will rear his gorged flappy jowled head as often as he can slither to the television cameras.

January 20, 2009 gets closer everyday!

After I saw “Milk” last Friday, I walked home, closed the door and broke down.  I cried for hours, I couldn’t stop.  My stomach cramped up.  I remember the day Harvey Milk was murdered, along with Mayor Moscone — I hadn’t thought about that day in a long time.  Memories crashed down on me like bricks in an earthquake — suddenly, unexpectedly.  Milk was killed 5 days and 15 years after JFK.  During the 70s, my life evolved like a movie on fast forward, like a 78 record spinning on a turntable.  It was dream-filled and dream-fueled.  As quickly as the 70s had arrived and passed, the 80s slammed down, a deadly barricade against the future.  Milk died before the carnage.  He would have been a leader during the maddening early years of the plague, later AIDS now HIV, when my lovers and friends became sick overnight, when nearly everyone I knew had friends and lovers and family members who became sick overnight with unexplained and undescribable illnesses.  Panic gripped everyone.  I felt my lymph nodes a hundred times a day.  But, oh, there was Kevin, he wasn’t afraid — raspy voiced, 24 year-old Kevin, a man I loved in a way I had never ascribed to love.  He was pissed.  His startling blue eyes threw a javelin at me when I described to him an article I’d read in the Village Voice about how the “gay cancer” might be caused by having sex.  I nearly lost my mind when he died a year later, abandoned by his family, in isolation at Harborivew, nurses and doctors gowned and gloved, masks on their faces.  I recorded a cassette tape of Joni Mitchell tunes and took it to him with a cassette player on one of my daily visits.  I refused to wear gloves and a mask.  It was a few days before he died.  He could barely talk but I understood the message from his eyes — he hated Joni.  It was Laura Nyro he loved.  And I knew that.  But I forgot.  He died before I finished the Laura Nyro tape.       

I saw the movie “Milk” today, based on the life of Harvey Milk.  My history was repeated back to me, from the phone tree ’70s to the cell phone ’08s.

Here is a fact I know to be true:  My straight friends and family have always believed I have more rights than I do.  However, since I married Luke 3 months ago, after 24 years together, they are confused because all those rights they thought I had which I never had they now think I’ve lost since the passage of Prop. 8 in California.  Guess what?  They are right, at last.    

The California Supreme Court agreed to hear 3 cases today around the passage of Prop. 8.  This is good news.  One way or another, the court will decide early next year whether the California Constitution allows for a 50 + 1 majority of California voters to amend the Constitution in order to take away rights from same sex couples who want to marry.  The state Constitution has never been amended to take away rights, to make it legal for a tax paying class of citizens to become 2nd class citizens. 

Oh, and a question for Mike Huckabee, who believes that until your head is bashed in you do not deserve equal civil rights.  When was the last time a friend of yours was bashed in the head by a stranger just because of who your friend chose to love?  When was the last time a straight friend of yours was crucified on a barbed wire fence in Wyoming because he loved the “wrong” person? 

Onward and Upward.

I want the decision on Prop. 8 to happen quickly, too.  The following is from Lisa Leff, writing for the HuffPo, 11/17/08:

“Meanwhile, the interfaith California Council of Churches and the Episcopal bishops of Northern California and Los Angeles added their petition Monday to those asking the high court to invalidate Proposition 8. They argue that if voters are permitted to take away rights from a group based on sexual orientation, the same could happen to religious minorities.”

25 years ago today I met the man I married on Aug. 9, 2008. We celebrated our 25th Anniversary today by marching, along with 15,000+ fellow San Diegans, against the passage of Prop. 8, which ended the rights of same sex couples to get married in the state of CA, a right Luke and I exercised in August. The crowd was enormous as we marched down 6th Avenue alongside Balboa Park on one side and high rise condos on the other. As we turned the corner onto Broadway downtown, I looked back up the 6th Ave. hill, it was filled with marchers as far as I could see. I carried a sign that said, “Let’s Make Harvey Milk Proud Today.” Several “old” hippies like me were cheered by my sign. I suspect some young folks who marched didn’t know who Milk was and what part he played in the history of the Gay Rights Movement, which is one of the many benefits of this movement, all generations coming together, learning, feeling the energy. Cruising the web since I returned home I know one thing, this day will be remembered by all of us, all generations. The time is now.

Since Prop. 8 passed, I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard that it will just take a little more time, another few years, just wait a little longer, and people will get it and “allow” gay couples to marry. I’m tired of waiting. In the current issue of The New Yorker (11/17/08) David Remnick writes about Obama’s campaign for the Presidency. Remnick quotes the Reverend Joseph Lowery, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a leader of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, when he told an audience in Atlanta in January, 2007, that “a slave mentality” still haunted those who counselled Obama to wait his turn. Remnick continues: Lowery compared those who discouraged Obama to the white ministers who in Birmingham told Martin Luther King a half century ago that the time was not ripe for civil dissent. “Martin said the people who were saying ‘later’ were really saying ‘never,’ ” Lowery said. “The time to do right is always right now.”

http://jointheimpact.wetpaint.com/?t=anon

The California State Constitution was amended a week ago with the passage of Prop. 8.  It is now illegal for same sex couples to marry in the state of California.  As for those gay couples who were married during the past three months while marriage was “legal” in California, there are now conflicting legal opinions on whether or not those couples are still married. 

Hence, 

NATIONAL PROTEST AGAINST PASSAGE OF PROP. 8

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2008

MARCH BEGINS AT 6TH AND UPAS, MEET-UP AT 10 A.M.

MARCH ENDS DOWNTOWN SAN DIEGO

There are protests planned all over the country this Saturday.  As soon as I have a common website or thread, I will post it.  Until then, organize.