come out, come out, wherever you are

Last Friday nite, we were sitting around the living room with an old college friend of Deborah’s and her 53 year old sister from Idaho. The sister, let’s call her Linda, moved to Idaho when she was 19 and had never seen a homeless person until Friday. She has grown children and grandchildren, and looks like Linda Evans from Dynasty. Or was that Dallas?

The night before, they had gone to Mecca and the Lexington Club, your friendly neighborhood dyke bar, which I thought a bit odd for two straight women. I forget exactly what we were talking about when Linda said, “I am in the process of coming out.” Jokingly I said, “As what?” “As a lesbian” she answered.

I almost fell over. Her sister's jaw dropped too, as she realized why she had been on a tour of the lesbian hot spots of San Francisco. Now, I have been a lesbian for a LONG time, and know that we come in all shapes, sizes, ages, etc, but somehow it always surprises me when someone who looks so straight wants to become a lesbian.

So how does a married woman in Idaho go about finding a woman? Craigslist! We sat by my computer, and I showed her Craigslist Idaho, the dyke march 2008 video on hillgirlz.com, and the SF pride website. All of the partially naked women at the dyke march were pretty surprising to her, and she asked me if all of those women were “that way.”

It made me feel so lucky to have come out in 1972 in the height of the second wave of feminism. (As a mater of fact, I just picked the up the 35th anniversary issue of Ms. Magazine. I remember when it first came out.) I moved to San Francisco in 1974, and have probably taken for granted all of the freedom we have here as gay people.

When I toured with the Blazing Redheads in the 1980s, we met lesbians in all these small southern towns, and the only time they could hold hands with their lovers in public was at women’s music festivals. It’s hard enough to imagine being a lesbian in some of these places, but being a 53 year-old married grandmother in Idaho trying to come out!

This woman is tough as nails, and will be happy no matter what she is doing, but I am just reminded of woman all over the world who want to be with women but can’t because of political persecution or their own internalized homophobia. I feel lucky.

dyke march

Well, it’s that time of year again. The dyke march committee is revving up to put on the largest annual women’s gathering in the world. It’s a lot of work, especially raising the money. It costs about $25,000 to put on the dyke march and rally, and it always amazes me when women say, after arriving at the park complete with stage, sound system, trolley car for disabled and old women, and a sound truck, “What does the dyke march need money for?”

But the day of the march of the march is nothing short of exhilarating! When I look at the pictures from dyke march 2006, I get shivers down my spine. The sheer number of women, and the diversity of race, age, size and physical abilities is astounding.

When the current dyke march committee formed three years ago, we made a commitment that the dyke march committee, as well as the talent on the stage, would be at least 50% women of color. In order to achieve parity on the committee, after the 2004 march we decided that new members would be women of color only.

Why is it so important to have parity? If we look around, there are not that many organizations that are truly racially diverse. Is it just because “we just gravitate towards people who are like us”, or is racism so prevalent in our society that we, in our little subcultures, cannot see how it divides us?

When I posted on craigslist that the dyke march was looking for women of color to join the committee, I stated that this was not an attempt to exclude white women, but an attempt to achieve racial parity on the committee. I was ecstatically relived that there were no angry calls of “reverse racism”(something that I don’t believe exists) from white women.

In another organization I was in, parity was achieved by women joining in pairs, and if you were white, your partner had to be a woman of color. It may seem that these are artificial or contrived methods of creating a multi-racial organization. But in this society, and yes, even within the lesbian community, we are still divided across racial lines, and seemingly contrived measures are sometimes needed to bridge the divide.

At the dyke march meeting yesterday, there were more women of color than white women. That doesn’t mean that we are finished, that we don’t have struggles about a variety if issues, including class and race, but if we aren’t all at the same table, the dialogue will not even occur. And on the day of the dyke march, watching the talent on the stage that represents lesbians of all colors, I see the organic results of our work.