Topsy-turvy!

Things have gone kind of topsy-turvy in my life over the past couple of weeks. I feel like I am truly at a very pivotal point in my life. One of those sink or swim moments, you know? About a week back, I got some great news. After three years of waiting, SpeakOUT finally has its own website! Bookmark it! The site went live last week, but is now under construction. It should be up and running for real by no later than May 1st. The best part is that it didn’t cost me a dime. My good friend and supporter of SpeakOUT, Nick S., paid for the domain and is now my webmaster. He loves working on the site and I love him for loving it. :o)

In preparation of adding a page for organizations that support our group, I sent out a very generic email to our listserv asking for people to send in logos and so forth. Apparently this email led Stonewall to assume that we were bailing on them. Karla (the ED of Stonewall Columbus – SWC) went as far as to get miffed because I didn’t ask for her input on the site. Why would I? I’ve only been waiting 3 years for them to get off their asses and give me a lousy page on their site. Also, it didn’t cost them a penny, so what do they care? I guess it was just the “in” Karla was waiting for because within 48 hours of this email, I found myself in her office deciding how to best cut ties with SWC.

Now, I have to say that this was my plan all along. I wanted out. I needed out. But I wasn’t ready to do this right now. It was very overwhelming and a bit scary to be honest. Yet it was actually the best thing that could have ever happened. They wanted us gone and I wanted to be gone – and now we are. If you were to look at this as a divorce, I kicked SWC ass! I got everything…our money, the name, the logo, the computer, free booth space at Pride…everything. :o) Of course, Karla gave me the big we can still collaborate in the future line as I left…but it’ll be a cold day in hell before I approach them. If they want us – and they will – she can come to me. I’m looking forward to that day.

So here I am with this group! But which way do we go? That is the million dollar question that I’ve been pondering 24/7. I could create my own 501c3, which is a lot of work and red tape. Regardless, I will still need another group to be our fiscal agency, especially since SWC refused to extend that option to us. I have an appointment tomorrow with Lynne B., the ED of Equality Ohio. They are looking to add an Ally Coordinator to their group in 2008. They even have it in their budget. Of course, I want this position. Hell, I’ll go as far as to say I deserve it. So, I approached Lynne about a partnership between SpeakOUT and Equality Ohio. She is interested enough to meet with me…which is a good sign. Now what do I do?

I obviously don’t want to end right back up where we were with SWC. But I feel like SpeakOUT could become big now…so I am not ready to just hand it over either. Sadly, the bottom line is coming down to money. I’ve been running this group without pay for three years. For some of that time I was working, but I haven’t worked for over 2 years now and we can’t manage this much longer. My son’s diabetes is very expensive to maintain. So, I must find work by the fall. Once I do this, I can no longer be as dedicated to the group as I am now. I wish I could see the right path to take. Right now it is all a haze.

I’ve been spending most of the last week working on bringing us out from under SWC shadow. I’ve had to change our logo, contact the print media about our listings, change handouts and so forth. Everything with SWC info on it must be altered. It’s been rather crazy. Now I’m researching what I must do to copy right our name and logo. We also just did another marriage equality panel at a local law university in town too. When it rains it pours…luckily it is all good.

In the not so good category, we just had to pay $500 to fix our car. I had no choice. It is the only vehicle we have and we cannot afford to be without it. Our tax refund is slowly draining away. I am anxious about this. Summer is coming up and I need to be able to take the kids places and have some money to rely on. Luckily, I am now officially a contract worker! Equality Ohio is paying me to work with them on the Lobby Day project. I’m excited about that because every employee they have ever hired worked as a contract employee first. I feel like it is getting my foot in the door.

Today is Meg’s first day of softball practice. She is really excited about it. I think she will be good at it. We’ve been playing catch in the backyard with her new glove. I just hope she likes it after she is out there. I’m still trying to find something for Brandon to do. He wants to play golf and he also wants to try karate. His diabetes is all over the place these days. It makes me a nervous wreck. Why can’t they figure out how to fix this? It’s been months.

Well, I have tons to do. Especially laundry!! I better get going. Wish me luck…send me positive vibes. I’m getting ready to take a leap of faith!

Saga...Version 2.0

“I can see by your eyes you must be lying;
When you think I don’t have a clue.
Baby you’re crazy;
If you think that you can fool me…
So keep your auditions for somebody;
Who hasn’t got so much to loose.
‘Cause you can tell by the lines I’m reciting,
That I’ve seen that movie too.”
I’ve Seen That Movie Too (1973)
~Elton John

It has been a while since I last wrote about my saga regarding Barb…to be truthful it was a nice break from bad memories. However, the story is not over. I believe the last time I wrote about this, I was finally letting go of my anger and trying to get on with my life. I had started taking depression pills. I also began writing new game stories and even trying my hand at gaming with others again. So let’s start anew in a chapter I like to call…Cheri & Barb Version 2.0

Once I started to let go of all that toxic hate inside of me, I could begin to think more rationally about Barb again. A few months earlier, I would have rather ate shards of glass than admit that I still missed her, but now with calming clarity as my friend I could admit this to Brian. My father had been working on me to give it another try with her for weeks. Knowing that he had been in touch with her, I thought maybe there was good reason for his meddling remarks. One day while I was shopping with my kids at the Discovery Channel Store, I came across a shirt that I knew that Barb would love. It had a Chinese symbol on it and said “chi” under it. Barb’s character Simon was all about “chi” and that sort of stuff – it was perfect. For no reason at all, I bought it. It sat on my dresser for a long time…

I thought and thought about contacting Barb. The only other contact I had with her since the big break-up was when I had written her an email on 9/11. I was all emotional and raw – as we all were that day – and I wanted her to know that I loved her and was glad she wasn’t one of the dead. She never replied and I honestly don’t even know if she ever read it. It didn’t matter. I wanted to write that letter and I am glad I did. Finally, I did decide the time was right to try. I sent her a package; it had the shirt in it, a game tape I had made during our time apart and a big new story that I had written about Martin & Ben. (My future therapist said that I was trying to “woo” her back with this act.) I sent it FedEx and waited to see what would come of it. It took her awhile to respond, but she did.

Barb sent me a short email. I remember a jolt of shock ran through my body upon seeing her email in my inbox. It was like an unexpected slap across the face. I felt dazed. I was afraid to open it to be honest…but of course I did. It basically said that she felt the time was right to contact me again. She had considered it many times in the past apparently but just didn’t. She called me “old friend” and told me how she spent most everyday thinking of me in one way or another (she admitted to listening to her game tapes all the time and reading over our old stories as well) and told me that she was happy that I sent the package. She then told me how much she loved her care package and how she had a surprise for me as well. She told me that having new game material to read was like a “breath of life” to her and that she wanted to return the “gift of the game” back to me. She never apologized for leaving…never explained…and that was how it would always be. For reasons unknown to me even now, I allowed this.

We only spoke about the “break-up” once. After a month of emailing one another, we decided to try to IM again. We spoke about this and that…it was very uncomfortable. I don’t remember now what made the subject come up, but suddenly we were talking about the break-up. I told her that I was angry that she never apologized to me – after all, I had apologized for my mean email following the break - and she still didn’t apologize! She was angry that I hadn’t wanted her to be in contact with my father. (Apparently my father was the “closest thing she had to a real dad” and I had no right to ask her to stay out of his life. Um, hello?! He was my real father! Besides that, my loser of a father just wanted to jump into her pants like all the other girls he spoke to online anyway.) Things got heated. I remember her telling me that she couldn’t handle my anger...I was so angry she said. Well, what the hell did she expect? She would have really freaked out to know the absolute rage that filled me all those months back! Suddenly she blurted out, “I though you were over this. If I had known you weren’t…” and she just trailed off. The bitch didn’t even have the balls to finish her sentence. Then she said something that I’ll never be able to erase from my memory: “You don’t get to be the martyr!” WHAT?! I remember saying, “How do you figure that YOU get to be the martyr in this scenario? You left me – with no explanation. You told my father what your problems were – but didn’t tell me. Now you are blaming me for not being there to help you! You better believe I get to be the fucking martyr!”

Let’s just say it is a miracle of epic proportions that we were still willing to speak to each other after that evening. Somehow we managed to agree to disagree and walked away from the topic – never to revisit it again. I never did learn what happened, or why her life was so terrible at the time that she wanted to kill herself. I never learned why she felt it was necessary to leave me behind either. I never did hear her say she was wrong or that she was sorry for the way she handled things with me. We just didn’t talk about it anymore.

More than nine months of absence in each other’s lives slowly started to move behind us as we began writing polite, careful emails back and forth again. Every now and then we might IM. I was committed to trying not to screw up again. I made a promise to myself to listen to my father’s advice about Barb – he had told me that Barb did not want me to fix her problems, but to just listen to her. So this time around I kept my mouth firmly shut when it came to subjects like her mother, sister, her boyfriend Charles and money. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that hard. Sure…I’d have loved to give her some advice and try to help her but I didn’t have too. I felt some pressure lift off of me. I wonder what she thought of my non-committal, bland “uh-huh” and “Oh, that must suck” comments. I wonder if she even noticed at all. In an act of self-defense, I also kept her at arms length from me. In truth, I had built a steel barrier around my bruised heart, and no one was fucking get in there -especially not her! I didn’t share everything with her and I only opened up about certain things. I was very careful – wary that she would suddenly leave me once again.

We focused on how to do our second chance the “right way.” We agreed early on that we spent too much time in the past talking about the game. Where had our friendship gone during that time? So we tried to make a rule about no game talk. It worked about as well as putting an elephant in a china shop. I remember one very awkward IM session…we were trying to talk to one another like girlfriends (as in BFF not life partners). It was pathetic. We ended up talking about what bubble bath scents we liked for God’s sake! After about 15 minutes of painful dialogue it became clear to me that we had almost nothing in common anymore. I bought us both a subscription to Glamour magazine so we could both read the same magazine and chat about that. She was polite about the idea, but (much) later admitted to me that she hated magazines like that. I had nearly no interest in farming or web design. In short…we were fucked.

All that was left was the game. Barb tried to address it in a different manner this time around. For years we had talked about turning our game into a book. I had even started working on pieces of it. I had worries about whether we could adjust it enough not to get sued by White Wolf publishing and/or whether we could work with them on the project. I also worried about Barb’s quality of writing. I liked to read her stuff because I loved the subject matter – an editor would not be amused by her rambling, poor grammar and obvious plagiarism of old movies and books in certain story lines. I could fix those problems, but I couldn’t change one very obvious problem – her tendency to just flake on deadlines. She balked at the very notion that to write a book, you must write everyday. Every writing class I had taken, or book about writing books that I had read, said otherwise. Still, when she asked me if I wanted to try to write our game as a book, I agreed. Soon we were talking about the game again…but calling it “working on the book.”

Can you believe how fucking ridiculous we were? Why couldn’t we just admit it? We weren’t really friends anymore…we just needed one another to continue our game. We were junkies and we needed one another to get our fix. If we could have just been straight up honest about this, who knows how things might have played out? Instead we had to pretend otherwise and act like friends even though it was obvious we weren’t. It was like watching the Titanic sink from a small leak instead of a huge hole from crashing into an iceberg. The ending was inevitable – but we went on playing our roles with blinders on and forcing smiles while the water began to rise all around us.

Me versus the Founder of Act Up!

On March 20th, iconic gay activist and founder of the protest group Act Up, Larry Kramer wrote an open letter to straight Americans for publication in the Los Angeles Times. The title revealed everything: “Why do you hate gay people so much?” Kramer goes on to say “You may say that you don’t hate us, but the people you vote for do, so what’s the difference?” He writes, “Our own country’s democratic process declares us to be unequal. Which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you. You treat us like crumbs. You hate us. And, sadly, we let you.”

Let me be completely honest: this letter pissed me off before I could even get through the first paragraph. Kramer does not allow for the existence of a growing population of straight Americans who are as equally disgusted by the unequal treatment of the LGBT community in our country, me included, and who are actively trying to do something about it. Nor does he take into account that by nature most humans, regardless of sexual orientation, are so self-absorbed that they barely acknowledge life’s cruel inequalities unless it directly impacts them – which is hardly a good excuse but the truth nonetheless. Instead, we straights are lumped together as a single hate filled unit in which Kramer seems to blame every negative thing that happens to LGBT identifying people from cradle to the grave. Kramer gives Jesus Christ a run for his money on martyrdom in this letter. I expected more from the founder of Act Up; instead as Kramer moves into the winter of life it seems that he has decided to claim the role of victim.

If I have learned anything from the past several years as a straight activist for the LGBT community, it is that hating a person based solely on their sexual orientation or expression is wrong. People should only be judged on who they are as individuals and not viewed as simple stereotypes. That goes both ways Mr. Kramer.

To be fair, Kramer’s rant is not without truth. LGBT individuals face unfair attacks on their personal lives in this country. They are denied the same basic rights and protections that their counterparts in the heterosexual community take for granted. Indeed, some straight Americans do hate gays and are doing everything they can to limit equality for them. These people are extremist however and do not make up the bulk of the population. Fellow straight ally John Marzluf, who also read Kramer’s letter, made some keen observations: “I think Larry Kramer makes some very relevant points and perhaps he is even ‘right on’ with many of his observations. However, I disagree with his basic claim that straight people HATE gays. I think most straight people just don’t understand gay people. The average straight person, who is not brain-washed by religious intolerance, simply reasons in their own mind that ‘gay’ is 180 degrees away from their own personal identity. This ignorance is not hate. Most straight people short change gay people by simply looking at them as sexual beings, yet if they were reduced to a sexual existence they would feel greatly misunderstood. We must all realize that as individuals we are all multi-faceted people (gay and straight alike) with sexuality being just one small part of our selves.”

I found it interesting that no where in his two-paged letter does Kramer reference the damage done to the LGBT community by closeted gay people. Where is his outrage for the gay politicians and clergy who are crushing their fellow gays in an attempt to hide their own true sexuality? I suppose that this could be blamed on internal homophobia from living in a heterosexist environment…but shouldn’t these people be branded as enemies of the community along with people like Ann Coulter and Ken Blackwell?

Additionally, Kramer’s letter shocked me with its persistence in creating a world in which LGBT individuals were not a part of American society. I’m sure that it can feel that way, particularly on the heels of 2004 election, but in reality it simply isn’t true. Kramer writes, “Your top general just called us immoral.” He’s not just my top general; he is every American’s top general. Kramer’s insistence that straights vote in gay-hating politicians as proof of our hatred is plain ridiculous. Does Kramer really think that we straight voters get a different ballot when we vote? That there are gay-friendly candidates available to vote for but we choose not too? Sorry to say that straight voters have the same lame candidates to choose from as the LGBT voters.

The best any American can do at this point is vote for the lesser of two evils in many cases. As for myself, I research each candidate on their records regarding issues that are important to me (like supporting LGBT rights) and check out which candidates gay rights organizations are supporting before I hit the “vote” button. I’m sure that my LGBT friends use the same method, despite Kramer’s poor advice that gays should not vote at all. “To vote for them (candidates) is to collude with them in their utter distain for us.” I was raised believing that when you choose not to vote, then you give up your right to bitch about the results! Perhaps Kramer would be better served ranting about the apathetic attitudes of many in the LGBT community and the general lack of motivation to advocate upon their own behalf for a better life.

Speaking of gay (and gay-friendly) candidates…where are they? Despite a February Gallup poll which concluded that 55% of its respondents would feel comfortable voting for a homosexual presidential candidate, the last time I looked there were none. I’ve been encouraged, however, to see more openly gay candidates running for local and state offices in Ohio – and you can bet I vote for them when I can. If you want a success story look no further than my friend Mary Jo Hudson. Still, this trickle of brave souls who choose to run a campaign as an “out candidate” is still not the norm. All fair-minded Americans need to support these candidates to encourage others to run a LGBT supportive ticket as well. It has to start somewhere.

Sadly, as Kramer has aged he has turned into a bitter, defeated person who spends his energy and influence in the wrong way. He writes, “I am almost 72, and I have been hated all my life, and I don’t see much change coming.” I feel empathy for Kramer. I’ve felt like he has, but I’ve chosen to try anyway. Maybe at 72 I’ll be in his shoes…but I hope not. I feel hope is springing all around us. I feel encouragement reading the newest poll recently released by Equality Ohio that 91% of those polled supported hospital visitation rights for same-sex couples. I see a better future every time I meet with high school GSA members who have so much passion and intelligence for the cause and are untainted by previous generation’s hang-ups. I feel renewed hope every time I meet a new ally.

My worst fear regarding Kramer’s letter is that somewhere a potential straight ally might be turned off by his anger and obvious disdain for heterosexuals. It certainly makes my job as the founder of a straight ally organization a bit tougher. I also fear that impressionable LGBT people will read this pioneer’s words and see them as the way to live their lives. For the record Mr. Kramer, my family and I do not hate you or any of your LGBT brothers and sisters. Despite your resistance in believing that a change is coming, I am here to tell you that the change is already happening! I am part of it and I plan on continuing to work toward full equality for all Americans with or without your support.

You can read Larry Kramer’s letter by visiting the following link:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kramer20mar20,1,6605635.story