Family

The September 3, 2012, issue of The Chronicle Review has a beautiful article by David M. Halperin called "How To Be Gay." Halpern writes about "the notion that homosexuality is not just a sexual orientation but a cultural orientation, a dedicated commitment to certain social or aesthetic values, an entire way of being."

That distinctively gay way of being, moreover, appears to be rooted in a particular queer way of feeling. And that queer way of feeling—that queer subjectivity—expresses itself through a peculiar, dissident way of relating to cultural objects.... As a cultural practice, male homosexuality involves a characteristic way of receiving, reinterpreting, and reusing mainstream culture....

What this implies is that it is not enough for a man to be homosexual in order to be gay. Same-sex desire alone does not equal gayness. "Gay" refers not just to something you are, but also to something you do. Which means that you don't have to be homosexual in order to do it. Gayness is not a state or condition. It's a mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: In short, it is a practice.

Many of my fellow queers would say, "Girlfriend, I don't have to practice. I was born this way!"

In any case, the article is worthy of a read. My original reason for citing it, though, is the accompanying photo and the ponderings that photo triggers.

This...is a family. A beautiful family.

And what the image recalls to me is the idiom I learned as I was first coming out in the early 1970s. When gays and lesbians want to reassure each other about a new acquaintance without outing that person to passers-by, here's what we say:

"He/she's family."

People, This is our WHOLE point.

We are family. Our relationships—however weirdly astray from the conventional—are family relationships.

As Walhydra said in a rant long ago:

As far as I’m concerned, the real problem is that most people have the ridiculous notion marriage is about sex!

And that includes queer people. It’s ridiculous! Marriage isn’t about sex. It’s about kinship....

Look. Anybody can have sex without getting married. They can even have on-going affairs, lifelong relationships—families, for Goddess’ sake!—without being married....

But If they want their chosen kinship to be acknowledged and affirmed publicly, if they want their families to be honored and protected by the government, they HAVE TO GET MARRIED!

In a sane world, people would be glad to take a couple’s word for it when they said they intended to put up with all the hassles and grief of taking care of each other for years on end. People would rush to celebrate and support them, do everything possible to help them stay together.

Instead…, instead…. It just doesn’t make any sense!

It's not that hard to understand.

Jesus and Mo: "Love"

No comment.

The guest

Recently, Walhydra has at times heard an indistinct yet somehow familiar voice murmuring in her ear. It has taken her a while to notice enough of a pattern to these occasions to realize that she should be paying attention.

Walhydra hears the voice most clearly during certain interesting moon phases. She also hears it, sometimes, if she makes a particularly satisfying movement or stretch during taoist tai chi chuan.

“Ah. Thank you,” the voice whispers.

“What? Who?”

After over three years of classes and practice, Walhydra’s body has learned to recognize quickly the relaxed and energized templates of full extension and settled, balanced weight—whenever she happens to stumble into them, that is. In fact, Walhydra is now more often able to stumble into them on purpose.

During the rare moments when this happens, Walhydra’s body rediscovers all of its missing parts. In particular, there is the matter of rediscovering her whole right side, from toes to crown.

Though Walhydra is naturally left handed (of course), she has also struggled since her fourth year with muscular and neurological asymmetry on the right, caused by non-paralytic polio. When she is inattentive—in other words, most of the time—Walhydra’s right foot, knee and hip splay outward a bit, throwing her whole frame off balance. To compensate, she has a chronic rightward crick in her neck, and something resembling a skyhook pulling up her left shoulder.

Though these distortions may only be outwardly observable to the trained eye, the gentle reader is left to imagine what fifty-some years of standing and sitting this way must feel like from the inside.

"It's as if I've spent most of my live hunching away from a blow," says Walhydra. "Shield arm raised—rather awkwardly—but sword arm useless."

The voice chuckles at this uncharacteristically warrior-like imagery.

"Huh?" Walhydra grunts, glancing around.

[Note from the amanuensis: It is definitely awkward to raise one's arm mainly with the trapezius rather than the deltoid.]

Back in the spring, Walhydra managed to get through two weekend tai chi intensive workshops. In both, advanced instructors from the USA headquarters concentrated on a few crucial movements, for the sake of deciphering, demonstrating and having students practice the precise angles and articulations which would enhance the health benefits of those efforts.

Walhydra was amazed at the consequences.

A core principle of taoist tai chi is to relax shoulders and lower back, to settle one's weight into one's hips and thighs, and to make one's movements by pushing the floor away and rotating around one's spine with the power of those thigh muscles.

A second core principle is to turn only within the angle between one's line of travel and forty-five degrees, and no farther.

[The various martial schools of tai chi use different principles, yet this approach focuses one's practice on the organic benefits of the movements.]

Two seemingly minor bits of personal coaching during those intensives turned all the lights on for Walhydra.

First, in a movement call a toryu [see image below], one foot is forward, while the back foot is turned out "at the 45."

One moves one's weight alternately between the front and back feet by pushing against the floor, turning, and dropping the weight into the opposite hip. Walhydra tends to wobble whenever she turns her weight onto an angled right foot and hip.

"Put your front foot a step farther forward than you're used to," an instructor hinted.

As odd as this felt, Walhydra tried it. With this small change, she found that the very structure of her skeleton obliged her to turn only forty-five degrees, instead of allowing her to collapse farther backwards.

It was as if her body were suddenly saying, "Oh! You mean that 45!"

Second toryu hint, a different instructor, a second intensive. "When you turn back, when you turn forward, keep your head and chest upright and lead with your heart."

Wow! This was like the lightning bolt of awakening from on high!

In the weeks that followed, Walhydra would get distracted while doing the tai chi set in regular class, because she kept sensing a degree of poise and extension she'd never experienced before.

"I have a right arm!" she exclaimed to her own instructor, only half in jest.

Eventually, she also discovered a right hip and leg. More recently still, she discovered an all-important deep body muscle: the right psoas!

[ For more on Walhydra and the "secret life of the psoas," see this story.]

All of this new awareness doesn't last, though, without conscious attention. In part because Walhydra is so lousy at maintaining any sort of daily practice on her own. Were she to do so, the conscious attention would become body knowledge.

Which brings us back to that voice.

One day, in the midst of some movement or other, Walhydra felt the characteristic popping of joints which comes with unkinking the right side of her neck.

Then her right shoulder and elbow and wrist popped, as she extended that arm. Then the right hip and knee...and all the way down to the bunioned right big toe.

"Oh!" said Walhydra.

And then, "Who's that?" said Walhydra.

Because it felt as if her whole right side had come alive and been fleshed out by...someone.

"You don't remember me?" asked the voice.

"Crippled Wolf! What are you doing there?"

"I live here."

"But...that's part of me."

"Yes."

"But how can you be there?"

"Do the math."

"Um...."

Walhydra puzzled over this one for a bit. She had thought that Crippled Wolf just existed in her mind—or maybe in her imagination.

"Well, yes. But I'm part of our body, too."

"Our?"

"How not?"

"Um..., well...." Walhydra felt very strange for a while, so she went back to concentrating on the tai chi set.

During her next class, Walhydra felt her usual collapsed-ness when dropping the weight into her right hip.

By chance, she straightened her neck again...and Crippled Wolf filled out her right side, directing the weight properly.

"How do you do that?" Walhydra exclaimed.

"You let me, when you straighten your neck."

"But it feels like I'm leaning my head to the left."

"You are. You're straightening your neck to the vertical."

"Oh."

Walhydra felt exhilarated and confounded at the same time.

"But...." She grasped for words. "It's as if someone else is in my right side. Someone I can't feel."

"It's just me."

"But why...?"

"Why do I feel like a phantom? Because you've been pretty much ignoring me for fifty-five years. That's why."

Walhydra shut up for a while.

The next time she wanted to extend her right arm, Walhydra straightened her neck again. And there was Crippled Wolf.

"This is going to take some pondering," she muttered to herself.

Since then, Walhydra's body has been the laboratory for an on-going experiment.

Walking through the reference stacks at work, she will straighten her neck ("pop, crunch") and unfasten her left shoulder from the skyhook ("crunch, pop")

"I'm still here," Crippled Wolf will whisper, as he stretches luxuriously.

Climbing the Main Library's pretentiously named Grand Stairway in the mornings, she will alternately sink her weight into one hip and then the other, each time pushing off with that foot.

"I'm still here."

Best of all, walking sometimes, or even just standing at the reference desk, she will push the floor away with her right root and feel Crippled Wolf rise, bone by bone, tendon by tendon, aligning each joint in turn from that bunioned big toe to the top of her head.

"You see what it's like when you let me be here?"

But Walhydra is understandably puzzled by all of this.

"Where have you been for fifty-five years?" she asks.

"Here."

"Why couldn't I feel you there?"

Crippled Wolf ponders this for a long time.

"Remember that first time we talked, after the werewolf dream?"

"Yeah...?"

"I asked you what you feared about the dream, and you daren't answer my question."

Walhydra's turn to ponder.

"I remember," she murmurs at last.

"I think it's about our believing we weren't allowed to be a 'real' boy."

Walhydra ponders some more.

"Um...what do you mean?"

"What do you remember, with the first little kids you knew, right after the polio?"

"Being happy. They liked me."

"Yeah. I remember that, too. But what do you remember about the new kids after we moved, the year after the polio."

Walhydra frowns.

"Kids laughing at me for spilling tomato juice on myself in kindergarten. Boys teasing me in first grade, because I was lousy at kickball. Being called a sissy."

"Yeah," Crippled Wolf says.

A long silence.

"Do you remember the first boy you had a crush on?" Crippled Wolf's tone is gentle.

Walhydra feels embarrassed. "Jeff, on Lassie."

"Any others?"

"Um...." Walhydra feels more embarrassed. "Spin, on Spin and Marty."

"Why?"

"Just because they were regular boys...I guess. And they were...um...cute."

"Nothing sexual?"

"I was five! Are you kidding?!"

"But not a regular boy. Not a 'real' boy."

Walhydra feels her anger rise.

"Are you saying that's why I'm gay?!"

"No, no!" Crippled Wolf says earnestly. "We've always been gay. I'm just saying that's why you forgot about me. Because they all kept telling you you weren't a real boy."

Walhydra has to sit down. After a long time, her curiosity gets to her.

"Are you gay?"

"I said 'We've always been gay.' Of course I am."

"But you're a real boy?"

"Of course we are! Look between your legs."

"Oh. Well. There is that."

"Dodo!"

"Poopy!"

Startled at hearing herself yell this childhood insult, Walhydra gives a boyish giggle, which Crippled Wolf echoes.

Then she remembers childhood shoving and teasing matches with her younger brother—who never said she wasn't a real boy.

"Yes," says Crippled Wolf. "There's always been that blessing. Our brother—and our sister."

"Yeah," Walhydra says, smiling. "But then...we were all pretty weird kids."

"The best kind."

Walhydra feels a glow. But then she stops short.

"But...," she begins. "But how come you're only coming out now? When I'm almost sixty?"

It hurts to ask this.

"It takes a long time to heal."

"From polio?"

"No. From teasing."

Walhydra sits a long time after this comment.

"Um. How come you call yourself Crippled Wolf?"

"Because we're crippled."

"By teasing?"

"No. By polio."

"But you said 'healing'."

"Yes. I said 'healing.' From being shamed, being teased. Not 'cured' from polio."

Walhydra stares ahead.

Crippled Wolf whispers in her ear, "That's what Jesus did, by the way. He healed people."

"Oh."

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Happy Anniversary

Full Oak Moon Saturnalia, December 17, 1994

Marriage under the care of
Columbia (SC) Monthly Meeting
of the Religious Society of Friends

There's more to the story, of course.

It keeps getting better.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Bless the Sunday New York Times

Walhydra is not usually one to read the Styles section of the Sunday New York Times—except out of curiosity.

Being a scrupulous Virgo, she makes every effort not to appear to care whether people think she is stylish, well-groomed or whatever...even though she tends to trim her moustache using a micrometer.

However, this morning, after the traditional 7 AM Sunday-champagne-on-the-porch with Joe and Nancy, the neighborhood houseparents across the street, Walhydra was moved to cook a Real Breakfast for herself and still snoring hubby Jim.

[Note: Being a Leo, JimJim, like any true cat, tries to sleep for at least 18 hours a day.]

Real Breakfast means driving to Publix—beware the champagne euphoria, please—to get the Times, free-range eggs, portabello mushrooms, butter, capers, majoram, fresh mangoes and blackberries, brewing fresh coffee (French press, of course), and whipping up omelettes and fruit on the side for her honey.

Yum!

Walhydra's reward for this was that hubby Jim actually read a whole, marvelous article for her, Cindy Chupack's Modern Love column, "An Ancient Coda to My 21st-Century Divorce."

[Cindy Chupack is the author of The Between Boyfriends Book. This essay is adapted from the anthology Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, to be published this month by Dutton.]

Being a writer, Walhydra wants to respect the intellectual property rights of Ms. Chupack (and the Times), so she won't repost the whole piece here. Nonetheless, she has to show you some bits that made the Sunday-breakfast-at-home-with-my-gay-hubby morning even more of a delight.

I WAS finally getting married. That’s what I kept telling people. I didn’t say I was finally getting married “again,” because bringing up a first marriage during the planning of a second is a major buzz kill for everyone involved....

And I didn’t want to hang that cloud over my fiancé, Ian, because this was his first wedding (another term I didn’t like, because it implied he may have a second). So we tried not to talk about first or second anythings until our meeting with the rabbi.

Ian called our rabbi “the hot rabbi” because she was young and hip and, well, hot. I didn’t mind his calling her hot. In fact, I found it reassuring, because it was yet another indication that Ian was not gay. Above all, I wanted to avoid publicly declaring my love for someone only to have him later realize he’s gay. Again.

Yes, O.K., so that’s what happened the first time, and that’s what I told the hot rabbi when she asked if either of us had been married before.

She blinked, and nodded — appropriately unfazed. Then she asked, “Was he Jewish?”

This seemed like a moot point to me, but I told her yes, he was....

Among the most remarkable things about [my new hubby Ian] was that after hearing my story, he remained straight.

During the divorce process I was toying with stand-up comedy, and my friend and fellow comic Rob had been endlessly fascinated by my story, asking: “What were the signs? How did he tell you?”

A year later, Rob came out, forcing me to see, in retrospect, that for him the hero of my story was my husband.

At a Hollywood party, I told my story to a cute guy I thought was flirting with me only to learn that he already was married. To a man. He explained that he had never even dated men until he met his husband while traveling abroad.

Then I told that story to my friend who was the host of the party, and he confessed that he was bisexual, which he said was often difficult for potential partners to comprehend. For example, he asked, how would I feel about dating him?

When I realized his question was not rhetorical, I blushed and declined.

Then I told that story to a male friend I knew to be straight, and he also confessed he was thinking of dating men, but after coming out to his stunned parents and trying a couple of gay relationships, he decided he was more interested in women, and he’s now married to a woman who had previously considered herself a lesbian.

My feeling, at this point, when everyone’s sexuality seemed to be in flux, was simply: Pick a side! I’m fine with it all! Just declare a major!

Ms. Chupack proceeds to tell the story of catching up with her ex...because the "hot rabbi" said she ought to get a get, a Jewish divorce decree, so that her potential children by her new hubby would not be considered illegitimate.

The rest of the story is a beautiful affirmation of gay marriage by this bright straight woman, but Walhydra will leave the gentle reader to view it at length. She'll just give you one more short selection:

It’s not often a girl has the chance to have lunch with the man she thought she would have children with and the man he had them with, but the truth is, they were a pretty perfect family without me.

I had met my ex-husband’s partner at a Christmas party years earlier and liked him immediately. He was handsome, smart, kind and funny, and whether it was accurate or not, I found it flattering to imagine that he was the male version of me.

Now they’d adopted two beautiful boys. As I watched my ex-husband juggle juice boxes and crayons and children’s menus, he smiled and warned: “Get ready.”

As a bonus, Walhydra herself stumbled onto this other piece in the same Styles section: Bob Morris' The Age of Dissonance article, "Global Yawning." Here's the first part of it:

I was running errands the other day when a pleasant young woman with a clipboard tried to stop me. “Do you have a moment for the environment, sir?” she asked.

“No,” I barked as I evaded her, “I don’t!”

I felt guilty, but also vindicated. I mean, of course I have a moment for the environment. Saying you’re not for the environment right now is like saying you’re not for education, children, world peace, Africa or a cure for cancer. These days you would have to be a fool or a lobbyist to dismiss global warming and natural resource issues.

But is it possible that all this marketing is cheapening the cause?

Must every hotel, restaurant, shampoo, detergent and beverage that is environmentally responsible talk so much about it? Yuban “sustainable development” coffee. Paul Mitchell “protecting our planet for generations to come.” Levi’s Eco jeans.

How much green-standing can we stand? It’s enough hot air to melt Antarctica.

In no time, an inconvenient truth has become an obnoxious one.

But from what I can see, there’s as much selling as thinking going on.

Read it.

And enjoy the day.

Blessèd Be.

The cup's smile

Walhydra has been a devotee of the 14th century Sufi poet Hafiz i-Shirazi ever since a decade ago when she first stumbled onto Daniel Ladinsky's marvelous English versions in The Subject Tonight is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz.

She can open to almost any of Hafiz's poems, and it's like getting a startlingly auspicious and uplifting card reading, an unlooked-for kiss from the Divine One, who is always described as the Friend or the Lover, always teasing the listener for feeling less worthy than the One knows her to be.

And always celebrating the blessedness of human incarnation—against all moralistic protests to the contrary.

Earlier on this Wednesday evening's shift at the library, struggling with burnout and depression, Walhydra was Googling at random for sites about "gay beauty" and hit upon just such a poem:

Ghazl No. 10 from the Divan of Hafiz

His mop of hair tangled, sweating, laughing and drunk,
Shirt torn, singing poems, flask in hand,
His eyes spoiling for a fight, his lips mouthing "Alas!"
Last night at midnight he came and sat by my pillow.
He bent his head to my ear and said, sadly,
"O, my ancient lover, are you sleeping?"

The seeker to whom they give such a cup at dawn
Is an infidel to love if he will not worship the wine.
O hermit, go and do not quibble with those who drink the dregs,
For on the eve of creation this was all they gave to us.
What he poured in our cup we drank,
Whether the mead of Heaven, or the wine of drunkenness.

The cup's smile and the wine boy's knotted curl
Have broken many vows of chastity, like that of Hafiz.

A variation on the interpretation of E.T. Gray, Jr., in
The Green Sea of Heaven, White Cloud Press, 1995.

What a sweet reminder, in the midst of Walhydra's spiritual stuckness, that there is delight hidden in all of the Divine One's work.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be!

Till death do us, etc.

Walhydra has never understood all the flap about same-sex marriage. Of course, this could be partly due to having been reincarnated as a gay male would-be writer.

“That has nothing to do with it!” she snaps. “As far as I’m concerned, the real problem is that most people have the ridiculous notion marriage is about sex!”

She glares briefly toward the left wing of her audience. “And that includes queer people. It’s ridiculous! Marriage isn’t about sex. It’s about kinship.”

Being a Virgo, Walhydra figures that in a reasonable world that pronouncement would settle the matter. Since she’s dealing with human beings, though, she knows that she’s going to have to explain.

“Look,” she says, feigning patience. “Anybody can have sex without getting married. They can even have on-going affairs, lifelong relationships—families, for Goddess’ sake!—without being married. But….”

Now she glares toward the right wing of her audience. “If they want their chosen kinship to be acknowledged and affirmed publicly, if they want their families to be honored and protected by the government, they HAVE TO GET MARRIED!”

Walhydra actually wants to stomp away at this point. It infuriates her that any society would even need “the arm of the state” in order to protect kinship.

“In a sane world,” she insists, “people would be glad to take a couple’s word for it when they said they intended to put up with all the hassles and grief of taking care of each other for years on end. People would rush to celebrate and support them, do everything possible to help them stay together.”

Walhydra sighs deeply. “Instead…, instead…. It just doesn’t make any sense!” She sits down abruptly and waves at everyone to go away.

Walhydra has had marriage on the mind for several weeks, every since her mother, Senior Witch, found a picture from the wedding of Walhydra’s younger brother back in 1986.

Walhydra immediately recognized the gorgeous bearded guy on the right as hubby Jim. She pretends not to know the guy on the left.

“That’s me,” says the would-be writer.

“No. You’re not that young,” Walhydra smirks.

“Neither are you.”

[Slight timeout while the referee intercedes.]

The wedding picture was taken just a year after Walhydra and Jim did the “for better or worse” bit themselves in a private, mostly unspoken ceremony for two.

That mutual promise, in turn, came shortly after Walhydra’s two plus years of grad school and addictions counselor job search—during which, ever the single-minded, studious Virgo, she had failed to notice Jim’s patient, persistent courtship.

Once settled in her first outpatient treatment job in Charleston, SC, Walhydra sat on the floor of a friend’s house one evening, watching, of all things, Somewhere in Time. At one moment, she leaned back against the legs of Jim, who was on the sofa, and thought, “Oh! This is the man I want to spend my life with. Why didn’t someone tell me?”

This brave, brilliant, gentle man with the warm hands, whose Leo body and soul radiate blessing energy!

[Note: Hubby Jim, a convinced scientist, teases that he doesn’t believe in tantric energy or astrology. “Or reincarnation,” he says. “At least, not in this lifetime.”]

Walhydra and Jim went to her brother’s wedding determined to remain discreetly closeted, so a not to draw attention away from the publicly happy couple. Her brother took them from friend to friend throughout the day, saying, “This is my brother, and this is my brother’s, um….”

He confessed later that he kept wanting to say, “…my brother’s loveranddoyouwanttomakesomethingofit?!” Instead, what happened was that “my Um” became a family in-joke term for same-sex spouse.

Toward the end of their visit, Walhydra and hubby went to say goodbye to both of her grandmas, with whom they had been carefully practicing their discretion.

Senior Witch’s mother hugged each of them and said sweetly to Walhydra, “Now, you come and visit me—and be sure to bring Jim!”

Walhydra glanced sideways at her hubby and raised an eyebrow.

A few years earlier, Walhydra had giggled when she received in the mail from her other grandma the pair of carefully embroidered pillowcases. For years, Grandma had periodically reminded Walhydra, “I make a set for each of the grandchildren, for when they get married.” Smiling at the colorful Pennsylvania Dutch stitch work, Walhydra assumed Grandma had finally figured it out for herself.

Walhydra’s stepmother told her later that, during a visit, Grandma had gone snooping to learn why Walhydra wasn’t married yet. When she somehow found out, her wry comment was, “Well, that’s what I get for snooping.”

That was all she ever said about it. Years later, Walhydra and Jim attended Grandma’s big, Ohio farm family reunion, sleeping in the guest bed of one of Walhydra’s aunts. A few years later, they both attended Grandma’s funeral.

So...nine years into their private marriage—on the Full Oak Moon Saturnalia of 1994, to be overly exact—Walhydra and Jim were publicly married under the care of their large Quaker Meeting.

Eschewing clergy and outward sacraments, Quaker couples traditionally “marry each other,” before God and in the presence of all their fellow Quakers, family and friends. They say to each other the vows they have written for themselves and sign a non-secular marriage certificate. Then, after a silent worship during which anyone can speak blessings or prayers, everyone else present also signs the document.

At Walhydra and Jim’s wedding, their Meeting’s historian spoke to explain the significance of what the gathered body was doing.

“In the mid-1600s,” he said, “only marriages performed by the Church of England were legally recognized. As dissenters from the C of E, Quakers decided that they needed to document and witness publicly the vows of their married couples, in order to protect the kinship rights of those couples. This is what we are doing now for these two men, whose marriage we all affirm but our government refuses to acknowledge.”

Twenty-some years into her marriage, Walhydra remembers that moment fondly.

She wonders how it can be in America that, because of the dominant ideology of churches other than hers, the secular government refuses to protect a loving kinship which she and Jim still sustain “for better or worse.”

She snuggles into Jim's calm strength after another long, challenging trip to care for Senior Witch—who considers Jim to be one of her sons—and frowns.

“Oh, well…,” she says softly.