We finally watched MILK (as in "Harvey") this weekend. Very moving and well-done. It made me want to revisit - and share with you - this long & thoughtful post by libba_bray, written back in May 2009 after California's sad & terrible vote upholding Prop. 8. Libba begins:

I was raised by a gay father. My dad came of age in the 1940’s in the Deep South. Being gay was more than just not okay then; it was downright dangerous. . . . When my father came out to our family, I was fourteen, and it was explained to me that we had to keep it a secret because my father would lose his job and might be attacked physically. The message conveyed was one of fear and shame which trickled down to all of us . . . .

Hilariously wonderful dream this morning about being at a con at a spread-out college with Holly Black & a buncha people I didn't know, feeling slightly left out. Then Leonard Bernstein turned up as one of the guests, and when we all needed to get to a talk at another location and various cars were being parcelled out by the organizers, he offered me a ride on the back of his bike. His own "talk" finished with him singing a medley of songs he liked. He was having fun, and didn't feel like he needed to impress anyone with his erudition. Though he was also flirting with all of us. I stuck around, and kissed him. We made an assignation. He kept saying, "I'm bisexual" and trying to explain it to me. I told him I was pleased, because I'd written an entire set of books in which practically everyone was, so it was good to have corroboration. (Woke up & remembered that he actually was. I met him twice while he was alive, BTW. My chorus, the New Amsterdam Singers, was one of the groups called in for his Mahler's 9th at Alice Tully, and once when the group went caroling at the Dakota - in one of the stairwells - he came out and applauded us and our conductor, who turned quite pink. He & that stairwell get a cameo in my new short story, "Dulce Domum," which I read most of at Wiscon.)

We never did get to bed, though. The other night, I dreamed that Jeremy Irons was around, and I was wondering whether there was any chance he'd take an interest in me. Eventually, he did - but I woke up thinking, "Dammit, it was my dream - why did I have to waste all that time worrying about it?" Silly me.

Have you noticed that no one in my books ever eats bacon or ham? No hard feelings; it's just not a part of my world view, and therefore doesn't show up in my worlds! (I only realized this recently when someone in a novel I was enjoying tucked into some....)

I was raised in the branch of Judaism called "Conservative" - less rule-bound than the Orthodox, but with a lot more Hebrew and tradition than Reform Judaism. It was founded partly in reaction to the Jews being allowed to join the modern world about 100 years ago. What to give up, and what to keep? As Wiki explains, it's "a modern stream of Judaism that arose out of intellectual currents in Germany in the mid-19th century and took institutional form in the United States in the early 1900s."

I drifted away, but am proud to see that it is continuing to evolve in response to changes in society. My mom handed me their new quarterly magazine last month, "The Freedom Issue: Looking at Passover, Liberty and Identity." Imagine my surprise to find a ton of articles about GLBT Conservative Jews - including rabbis! Because in a landmark decision in 2006, the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (yes, it's complicated. There is no Central Authority in Judaism. Think of it as . . . oh, different schools of Kung Fu which you can choose to adhere to?) voted to allow out gay men and lesbians to be ordained as rabbis and to allow rabbis to perform same-sex commitment ceremonies. I learned a lot and was very moved by the articles. They're all online for you to read at will. Here are some of my favorite excerpts from longer articles:
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And finally, there's a swell article on the origins of the Seder: a Greco-Roman Symposium of the 2nd century! It's short, so I won't excerpt it, and just urge you to read it if you've always wondered why the emphasis on reclining, hand-washing, and arguing philosophy around the meaning of food. Not to mention Why Four Cups of Wine? It just makes my cultural syncretism heart go pitta-pat.

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Tonight was the first Seder. Smallish, for various reasons. My mom, Delia & I worked hard, and it was good. Another tomorrow night.

May your parsley be springy & green, and your Liberation joyous!

Trust me, you don't want to miss this article from the NYTimes Magazine on scientific research on women's desire. Headline quotes: No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, women in the study, unlike men, showed strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. . . .[ADD:] for women on average, desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. " Women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. . . . . In comparison with men, women’s erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it.

I'm not saying they're accurate, but it gives you an idea of the range of the piece. Read it for details.

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Also, thanks to all who responded to the previous post on LitMags - I'm really enjoying the comments, and learning a lot!

So glad everyone's enjoying the Bob Morris piece on gay marriage! burgundy sent a link to a really great piece by Sarah Sarasohn of Berkeley, CA (and NPR - gosh, I always thought it was spelt "Saracen"!) from the Washington Post: "A Marriage Form will just be Icing on our Cake." While it also gives you the warm cuddlies, it is longer and more profound than Morris's piece. (It also echoes Delia's & my situation in some entertaining ways that I'll write about later, as I'm on deadline....) I particularly like her analysis:

( quoted here: )

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Meanwhile, deliasherman's trying to create a new website, and finding it a challenge to organize & taxonomize, as she has careers (and publications) in middle-grade/YA and adult fiction. I refer you to her post on the subject. My question: What other authors can you think of with the same issue? How did they deal with it on their sites?

And speaking of YA, I just finished A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama (ah! that telltale moment of authorial anxiety - like when I insisted on subtitling Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners and Thomas the Rhymer: A Romance) by Laura Amy Schlitz. Fantastic book. Read, read, read if you like well-rendered period setting with complex characters . . . its other virtues are for you to discover.

I dreamed last night that I had stubble all over my face, because I'd forgotten to shave for a few days. Indeed, I tried to remember the last time I had shaved, and thought, "Hey, wait a minute! I thought the whole point of being a girl was that you never have to shave!"

Guess I was wrong.

And may I add that I looked pretty damn good with it?

(I blame Torchwood, which we watched for the first time last night, On Demand - how I love the modern world! - now that our cable wire is finally installed and I have lost my fear of all the Remotes....)