An open letter to my BART Representative

Below is a letter to my BART representative, Tom Radulovich, about the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man (how sad is it that that phrase is almost cliche) by a BART police officer on New Year's Day.

Dear Mr. Radulovich,

I am one of your constituents in San Francisco in your position on the BART board of directors. I voted for you in the '08 election because of your commitment to alternative forms of transportation. I am writing to tell you that I am horrified and saddened by the recent shooting of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer. I am shocked that this happened, and more shocked by how little action has been taken by BART in light of this incident. There is not a doubt in my mind that the officer who shot and killed Grant committed murder, and he should be prosecuted as such. There needs to be a full investigation into the training and day-to-day work of the BART police, there needs to be civilian oversight, and we as a public need to determine whether it is necessary to have BART police at all. I have been shocked to learn in the past week that this is not an isolated incident; that there have been questionable shootings by BART police before in which the assailant has gone completely or partially without reprimand. It doesn't even make sense that the BART police would need to carry guns. Regular police are able to enter BART if there is an incident; a separate and armed police force with no civilian oversight and a history of unchecked violence seems completely unnecessary and grossly irresponsible. It makes me feel afraid of riding the BART.

In addition to this, I am dismayed and concerned that BART shut down several of its stations on Wednesday night due to the protest. It is my understanding that this has happened before, during a youth protest in Fruitvale. I am deeply concerned that BART is denying its ridership their right to free speech and political assembly. As you live in the bay area and are a proponent of alternative forms of transportation, I am sure that you are aware that a large number of bay area residents do not have cars and rely heavily on BART as their only way to travel to certain areas. It seems to me that BART was trying to stifle criticism of the shooting by shutting down the station where the protest was happening. Furthermore, I cannot stress how much shutting down BART stations at night threatens the safety of BART riders. I happened to be in Oakland on Wednesday night for a separate event, and when I heard they were shutting down some stations, I was concerned about how I was going to get home that night. As a woman living in a culture where violence against women is par for the course, nighttime commutes can be stressful enough without this added inconvenience, especially in light of the recent attack in Richmond.

As a member of the elected body that oversees the BART system, I hope you take these concerns seriously. It is beyond clear that changes need to be made immediately for the safety of all BART riders.

Thank you,
Sarah Mcdonald

If you live in BART District 9 (San Francisco neighborhoods: the mission, the castro, parts of SOMA, the TL, the haight, western addition, etc.) and would like to write your own letter to Tom Radulovich, here is his contact info: tom@livablecity.org, or 415-344-0489. Or, find your BART representative at www.bart.gov/about/bod/index.aspx.

for the widows in paradise, for the fatherless in ypsilanti

I'm sitting at a coffee shop in Ypsilanti, Michigan (that's pronounced ip-sil-antee). The windows reveal gray skies and a very large church next door. A small flurry of snowflakes is falling on the ground and melting upon impact, creating puddles that will probably freeze if the temperature dips below freezing tonight. It will at least turn into slush, that godawful combination of dirty snow and water that fills Michigan gutters until late April. The weather predicts it will keep steady at 34 degrees all day, so I should be good as long as I drive back to Lansing before dark. The music they're playing is mid-90s coffee shop stuff, like "what if god was one of us" and that song by that girl with the glasses from the reality bites soundtrack. I feel like I was transported back in time ten years when I walked in here.

Just a little slice of my life, for anybody that happens to read this. I'm in Michigan all this week, and freezing my goddamn ass off.

On Prop 8--From Someone Who's Been There (Twice)

I try to be an understanding person, but more and more, people just make it hard for me. The other day, a little old lady on a street corner tried to hand me a Christan pamphlet, I smiled and said no thank you. A few paces ahead I passed a younger man sitting on a square block of cement. He glared at me menacingly.

“Take it,” he said. “You should.”

It seems like everyone's edges are a little sharp these days, with the election a little over a week behind us. With oppression and discrimination written into the state constitution, you'd think the bigots would be happy. But they seem even more incensed, perhaps angered by our own shows of force, that we're not just rolling over and playing dead.

What bothers me most about the Yes on Prop 8 crowd is their use of the word “morality”. What morals could be better than to love and be good to one another, and try not to do anyone harm? If we follow their example, morals are just arbitrary rules by which one lives one's life. How can two people marrying be immoral, when taking someone else's rights away is not? The way I see it, they're the ones who are immoral. Heartless. Cruel.

And it hurts. Even more than the first time. You see, I've done this already. Four years ago, I was living in Michigan when Proposal 2 passed in a decisive victory for the homophobia brigades. Gay marriage never did happen in Michigan, but now it's really, really illegal. The language of the proposal banned the government from recognizing same sex marriage or “similar unions,” meaning that now public institutions—like city and state governments, public schools, and universities—now cannot offer same sex domestic partner benefits. Queer folks at my alma mater, Michigan State, used to get domestic partner benefits. Now they don't.

Prop 2 won by a landslide in Michigan. Everyone expected it. Since we never had gay marriage there, I didn't feel like I'd lost anything. I was more incensed by a second Bush victory than some ballot initiative pushed by some right wing zealots that only confirmed what I already knew. They hated us. It only gave me more reason to stick inside my little bubble of activist and queer friends, rest of the world be damned.

But then a year later, I moved to San Francisco. I didn't do it to be a queer refugee. I was happy enough in my little pocket of the Midwest. I left my home town for the same reasons anyone else does—to find change, direction, something different than the old familiar landscape I was accustomed to. But what I found when I got here was that I wasn't an outsider anymore. It took some getting used to. In Michigan, people saw me as interesting or different—because I was queer, because I was an activist, because I was politically radical. It took a while to get used to the idea of being just another face in the crowd. But the erasure of these distinctions from my identity forced me to see who I was beyond those labels, to become a whole person. In Michigan, my sexual identity was never far from my mind. Would new people I met at a party turn out to be homophobic? If I came out to my boss, would I face retaliation? Would I get gay bashed walking down the street with my girlfriend? But gradually, since I moved to California, I stopped thinking about it so much. Queerness stopped being the number one big thing that defines my life, and started just being another trait, like the timbre of my voice or the color of my hair.

And then the marriage thing happened. I was at a work training in Oakland when I got a text message from my sister congratulating me on my ability to get married. I texted back that I'd better find myself a bride now, and our mom would be so proud.

Before last June, I'd never really thought about marriage as a concrete thing that I could actually do. Sure, I thought about the concept in my Womyn's Studies classes back in college, when I decided marriage was just a patriarchal institution meant to exert a man's ownership of his wife. But it was never tangible. I came out when I was 19, and I certainly never thought about getting married before that. And after that it was never really an option for me so I didn't bother with it.

But in June, on the hottest day of the year, the news came in that I was no longer a second class citizen, and I'd forgotten that I even was. The powers that be, a group of straight people sitting in a room somewhere, had finally decided that they were not morally superior to us, that our lives and relationships were every bit as valid as theirs. That day was so hot I could barely peel myself from the couch, but I felt like an enormous weight I'd forgotten I'd been carrying was finally lifted from my shoulders. I'll always remember that day as Gay Marriage Day, when celebrants spilled into the streets and partied into the night. It was like the universe gave us two things we hadn't expected that day, gay marriage and real summer weather in San Francisco. For the first time in our queer lives, the stars were finally lining up in our favor.

I remember thinking I hoped to feel this way again on election night, when we'd finally rid ourselves of the Republican regime. I almost got to feel that way again. Obama's victory speech brought tears to my friends' eyes, but I kept saying I couldn't rest until I knew the results from Prop 8. I still can't rest. I feel like I'm carrying that enormous burden again that I thought for a moment I was free of. For a moment, I actually let myself think that my sexuality could no longer be a source of contention between me and people of a different orientation. For a moment, I thought I could just be another person, not defined by the “damning” labels of lesbian or queer. It was a nice moment. But we're not quite there yet.

In 1960, a group of young black students sat down at a segregated white lunch counter in Greensboro, South Carolina. They were arrested. In 1848, the first wave of feminists began demanding the right to vote. They did not achieve it until 1929. In 1977, San Francisco elected its first openly gay city supervisor. He was shot and killed the next year. And in 1969, a movement for queer liberation began with a riot at the Stonewall Inn in New York. Many of the queers at Stonewall were beaten and arrested, but one year later the first Pride March was held in New York City, and who knows where we'd be today without them. It's a law of physics that that for every action, there is a reaction. For every push for equal rights, there is a backlash. Whenever we push, they will push back. No one's liberation was ever won without a fight. This is our fight.

And yeah, it hurts. It hurts to know that some people in this state still think their lives, relationships, and choices are better or more valid than mine. It hurts that people define morality as something that essentially excludes me. It hurts to see television ads that frame my existence as an attack on theirs. It hurts that people are so horrified to think that their daughters might want to marry a princess someday. I say, let her have her princess.

When Prop 2 passed in Michigan, I just pitted myself against the world. But more and more, I've begun to see myself as part of it. And now this attack on gay marriage really feels like an attack on me. But it's also awoken me from my relative complacency in my Bay Area bubble. From a look around, I think I can say the same for a lot of others. Last Friday I participated in the most vibrant, energetic march I've ever been a part of, and I've been to a lot of marches. We were at least 2,000 strong, and, stopping traffic, we marched from Civic Center to Dolores Park, then back to Civic Center, and finally to the Castro, where a smaller group occupied an intersection until 6 in the morning. The crowd was queer and straight, transgender and gender normative, hugely diverse and overwhelmingly hopeful. I got the feeling that many of these people had never been politically active before. I saw the usual folks from my community—drag queens, dykes, gay guys, trans folks, genderqueers—but I also saw straight couples, Christians, and heterosexual families with kids. And that made me realize maybe this isn't over.

For every action there is a reaction, but that doesn't mean we lose. It means we keep trying. And maybe trying doesn't just mean fighting this battle in courts and governments, although that's certainly a part of it. Maybe it means breaking out of our safe little bubbles and talking to those people who think their morals are better than ours. Maybe it means challenging people's privilege, making them see that our rights aren't just a vague, abstract, political idea. We may never change the biggest bigots' minds, but we can wake up the people who follow them, who are so blindly comfortable in their lives they forget that although we are “other”, we are still human. Because we're all in this together. If we can start to see that, maybe they can too.

Wild Parrots

Some quotes from Mark Bittner, the guy who used to feed the parrots in North Beach. I'm watching The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill this morning.

"How do you get so attached to an animal? I know there's lots of people that have experienced something like this. In a certain sense they're a lot purer than we are. Because we have a lot of neurotic thoughts, things that bind us up inside, and we play a lot of games that animals don't play. They're really straightforward."

"There's a story that Suzuki Roshi told, he was the Zen master at the Zen Center here in San Francisco. He went to Yosemite. And he sees this big waterfall coming over this cliff. And it's one river at the top of the cliff, but as it falls, the river breaks up into all these individual droplets. And then it hits the bottom of the cliff and it's one river again. We're all one river...til we hit this cliff. That distance between the top of the cliff and the bottom of the cliff is our life. And all the individual little droplets think they are individual little droplets until they hit the bottom and then they're gone. But, you know, that droplet doesn't lose anything. It gains. It gains the rest of the river."

Fireworks

I woke up from a sex dream this morning. My roommate was in the kitchen, I assume getting ready for his weekend camping trip, because when I finally got up he was gone. All the better, because I could slug around the house and have my morning muesli and coffee in peace.

It seems like more and more, the people around me are in relationships. It wasn't like this a year ago. It's not that my friends all started dating people, it's more that the people I'm spending time with changed.

A year ago, I met a girl at a Halloween party. She was dressed like fireworks, all pipe cleaners and glitter. We literally bumped into each other in the mosh pit that is the Lex on Halloween. I named her Fireworks in my phone. I went home with her that night and we had something like a 2 week affair. She came to dia de los muertos with me, and gave me a jack-o-lantern pez dispenser. I still have it. She had curly hair and she was smaller than me and walking with her just felt right. I wondered if she could be the one, or at least one of the ones. I bought her a candy ring, to complement the pez dispenser, but before I could give it to her she called to say she wasn't over her ex, and she could do this. None of my friends even met her. She never came to my place. It was like the relationship that never was.

Just a few random thoughts today. I'm going to try and start blogging more.

It's a war zone out there

It's pretty fitting that a holiday commemorating the existence of the United States is celebrated by mimicking all-out warfare.

After being scared shitless last year in the face of the pyro display in Dolores Park, I decided to stay in this year. But that doesn't help much when you live in the city, where middle-of-the street firecrackers and the like are pretty commonplace, at least in my neighborhood. It was a trip just walking back from the corner coffee shop after dusk. I had to cross the street back and forth a couple times to avoid sidewalk cascades of flame. It sort of reminded me of the riots in Quebec City during the FTAA convention in 2001, only then it was fire and tear gas, not fireworks, in the streets.

I'm pretty happy to be boycotting the festivities tonight, as 4th of July in San Francisco is a little bit scary. That, and I got a little partied out at Pride last weekend. Two holidays in two weeks is a bit much for me. Let's just hope the fireworks don't conduct with any of that crackling dry California summer air. The last thing we need is to go the way of Big Sur.

Just remember: only you can prevent inner-city forest fires.

Prince(ss) in shining armor

When I was a kid I had a made-up romance with a boy named Erik who didn't exist. At least, I don't think he existed. At the time I was pretty sure he did. He was the boy of my dreams, literally, who in my sleeping life I met on the first day of junior high school, a 9th grader with sandy brown hair who was older and more sensitive than the middle school boys I had known.

I convinced myself that Erik was Out There Somewhere, my soul mate. I was a shy, romantic kid who didn't date until I was 16, so Erik was all I had. I pinned all my fairy tale daydreams on the idea that I would find him someday, that he was waiting for me. I drew a picture of him that I kept on my wall, next to my celebrity teen magazine crushes Jonathan Brandis and Claire Danes. In reality the drawing was a copy of a photograph of Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale from Rolling Stone, and due to my limited artistic abilities it more closely resembled Edgar Allan Poe than a 14 year old boy.


Poetry or Puberty?



My first boyfriend A. wasn't Erik. He only kissed me too hard in the attic above the choir room after school one day, and tried to rape one of my friends. My college boyfriend D. wasn't either, but I fooled myself into thinking I loved him because having a boyfriend made me somebody. Like my friends in high school who took birth control and went to parties, having a boyfriend and having sex somehow made them cooler than the rest of us, cooler than they had been before.

K. wasn't Erik either. She was my first girl. My freshmen year of college she kissed me at a party because she “wondered what it would be like.” When we collapsed under the kitchen table that night I unbuttoned her top and finally knew what had been missing from those early teenage dreams, kisses and gropes. I didn't even like her that much. She ended up dating my housemate and pushing me toward C., who “wasn't gay or anything” but liked me. I fell for C., down the stairs at her house, limping home later with a twisted ankle and a lot of disappointment. Seven years later my ankle still hurts when it rains.

In the three-quarters of a decade since then there have been dates, one-night stands, three-month stands, drunken hookups, girls-I'm-dating, periods of pure singlehood, and one short relationship. There was an N., an M., a few S.'s, a couple L's, some A.'s, a C., a V., a D., a T. and a J. There was even, horror upon horrors, a woman who shared my first name. But none of them were Erik, or his more appropriate counterpart, Erika. Instead of finding the soul mate I so believed in at the age of 13, I've evolved into perpetually single adulthood, scoffing at the very idea of soulmates, pitying my now-married former high school friends still in the midwest, and certainly not making the big “I Do” next week at the Gay Marriage bonanza at City Hall.

How did I get here? When did I give up on the idea of Happily-Ever-After, the princess and the, er, princess, riding off into the castle in the sunset? And when did I start writing like a lesbian Carrie Bradshaw?


Bulldyke?



Or maybe the question I should ask is, why did I ever believe in that crap in the first place? The One True Love, or One Great Love mythology so permeated my adolescent and teenage expectations that if, at age 16 I had been able to look ten years into my future, I would have been bitterly disappointed. The truth is, I gave up on all that after the first time I fell in love. M. and I had a firey, summer-fall romance my senior year of college, and if anyone I've dated was truly my soul mate, she was it. But if I am to truly believe in soul mates, that means I either negate what I had with M., or spend my 50-some odd years of life after 21 never falling in love again. And that's a long-ass time to be single.

I suppose at this point I could start to go into how these fairy tale ideas are used to control women, make us think we'll be sluts if we sleep with more than one person over the span of our entire lives (and think that being a slut is a bad thing). Or about how they prop up the institution of marriage, which, Supreme Court ruling aside, has historically functioned to prop up patriarchy and homophobia and racism and the class system and just about every other ideology good radicals like me throw molotov cocktails at. And I could point out that not everyone is wired for monogamy, that friends of mine are able to juggle multiple lovers without emotional dishonesty, a fact that makes me grit my teeth and secretly hate them when I haven't been seeing anyone for a couple of months. But the truth is, I don't see how I can believe in the fairy tale ideal anymore because there are just so damn many people out there. Even when I've self-limited my options to lesbian, bisexual, queer, or otherwise-identified-girls-who-are-into-girls, there are still thousands, maybe millions, of potential dating partners out there. And, barring accident, illness, or end of the world (knock on wood), I've still got another good half-century or more on this planet. I'm not saying I'm ruling out marriage (which is now actually an option for me in the state of California) or lifelong partnership, but I don't necessarily expect it anymore. These days when I look at my future, I don't see myself happily coupled off with the same person for decades on end. I don't see myself still single, either, growing bitter and more jaded at every coming year. The truth is, I don't know what to see when I finish up my twenties and head into my thirties, and forties, and fifties. Maybe not knowing is half the fun. Or maybe I should stop speculating, and end this blog.