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| Links for Lee Lynch http://leelynch6.tripod.com/ http://www.myspace.com/l eelynchwriter http://www.facebook.com/p ages /Lee-Lynch/111082605609 621?ref=ts |
Read a review of Beggar of Love by Lee Lynch |
| Four of Lee Lynch's ebooks have recently been released as a Classic Fiction eBook Bundle by Lee Lynch at Bold Strokes Books. They're available at: http://goo.gl/gaJIR |
| Gifts with Humanity |
| Eat Cleaner |
| Green Nest |
| Earth Wave Living |
| The Promise of Daffodils Here in Florida, our daffodils are coming up. No blooms yet, but I have high hopes we’ll have a chorus line of yellow dancing in the breeze come Valentine’s Day. Back in the big bad 1970s, Valentine’s Day was not so popular in my lesbian-feminist crowd. It was another capitalist ploy to get us to spend our money; a patriarchal tradition designed to snare women into enslaving themselves to men; a sexist ritual that excluded lesbians - did Hallmark ever make a card for us? Now I read in Ms. Magazine that St. Valentine was kind of on our side. Apparently, he got busted by Emperor Claudius II for marrying Christian couples when old Claudius nixed doing so, sometime around 270 A.C. It’s a pretty bloody story. Nevertheless, it’ s now cool to celebrate the saint’s day because so many Christians (and other religions) won’t marry another group: us. I don’t really see St. Valentine doing his bit for gays if he was around today, but I’m a romantic. Nobody can dampen my enthusiasm for the trappings of love. Any excuse will do, even an ancient martyr. Sweetheart doesn’t discourage me. She appreciates the displays of affection I foist on her. Not that they’re lavish. In past years, I’ve made quick visits to dollar stores. Maybe a Happy Valentine’s Day banner for the front door - or not, given our neighborhood. Maybe some decals scattered around the house – one year it was love bug stickers we later couldn’t get off the mirrors. My sweetheart’s not big on stuffed animals so there’s no collection of red and white teddy bears covering our bed. This year? I’m thinking a few heart-shaped balloons so every room she goes into, she’ll see “Be My Valentine,” “Cloud Nine,” or “#1 FAN” floating overhead, near the ceiling fans. Our first year presented a logistical problem. We would be on the road, at the Bold Strokes Books Palm Springs LGBTQ Book Festival, for Valentine’s Day. It was a perfect place to celebrate, but how could I decorate our beautiful room at the Casitas Laquita Lesbian Resort Hotel? I found red hearts, a dozen shapes and sizes, the kind that cling to glass surfaces, and I festooned the room with them. I don’t know which of us was more delighted. Candy-wise, Peeps are out. Other holidays, I’m glad to ply her with yellow chicks or orange pumpkins, but those putrid-pink and regurgitation-red marshmallow hearts ruin the Peeps concept. One year, I sought out the prettiest box of chocolates I could find and was gratified when my sweetheart even saved the empty box. I remember that my mother used one my father had given her as a sewing basket for decades: Aww. Now, we’re both fighting middle-aged spread – and spread and spread - so the candy is actually minimal, if any. Probably I should consider sending the money to Freedom To Marry, not Ghirardelli < www.freedomtomarry.org>. The corner Walgreens, however, might have a small tasty treat. More likely, a whole aisle of them. Who can deny her wife a traditional sweet? I just took a glance at the Walgreen’s web site for Valentine’s Day. One of their categories is “sexual wellness.” Hmmm, I thought and clicked on it. Up came the header “Queen.” This was getting pretty weird. There was only one product, though, a supplement called Reservatol. It was a buy one/get one free deal (BOGO). Did I even want to know what it was? Turns out, it contains red wine and Polygonum Cuspidatum Root. I drilled down further and found that Polygonum Cuspidatum Root prevents certain tumor growth. The whole product helps to provide antioxidant protection and helps to promote cardiovascular health. Thank goodness for BOGO – I can give my sweetheart one for Valentine’s Day and one for our anniversary. Hats off to sentimental Walgreens for the romantic suggestion. One year, I had a Groupon for a nice restaurant, but Groupon has changed. I’m not going to tell my sweetheart that I love her with a Groupon for cosmetic surgery, a Five-Window Car or Truck Tinting Package or a Birthday Party for Up to 16 Kids. None of those quite express why I married her. I know Ellen likes to shop at Cartier, but that’s out for us. It’s not that I don’t want to bedeck my sweetheart with diamonds and gold, it’ s the money thing. Yes, we have daffodils in February, but the mortgage on our home, like almost half of Florida’s home mortgages, is so far underwater we could sell the house as waterfront property. Harking back to the feminists of yore, I don’t need Cartier, Groupon or Walgreens to show my love on Valentines or any day. I’ m planning a homemade card, a funny refrigerator magnet and all my attention. Or maybe the attention and the promise of daffodils are enough. Copyright Lee Lynch February 2012 |
| Local Content |
| Sexual Language I didn’t like living with my father growing up and can’t imagine sharing a home with someone so essentially different from myself as an adult. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with guys, and I feel much more akin to gay male friends than to non-gay male friends. We’re just not compatible. The energy, for me, is akin to two magnets turned the wrong way – they very forcefully repel rather than attract. Living with a woman feels much more natural to me. There are no assumptions about roles. There are no Mars-Venus issues. I like traveling with a woman. I like shopping with a woman. I like sleeping next to a woman, socializing with women in person or virtually. I love writing about women and having a woman publisher. I understand, mostly, our relationships with one another. I’ve always said, as a symbol of my partiality to female company, that men’s feet are too big. I trip over them. They take up my space. I have no conversation for guys outside of work, for example, or perhaps shared missions. There are some words and phrases used regularly in gay culture that disturb me. The worst is “sexual preference.” It’s so limiting! Is this the best message to describe ourselves and to give to outsiders? In my experience, I have a gender preference as well as a sexual preference. Simply put, and although I enjoy male friends and relatives, I prefer the company of women. No matter what we’re doing together, whether it’s affectional, sexual or conversational. Heterosexuals are viewed as whole people. They don’t walk around with labels like lesbian or queer or gay. No one meets a non-gay person and immediately thinks of what they do in bed or with whom. At least I hope not. Yet when I meet a straight for the first time, I know I’m sometimes being viewed one- dimensionally. I’m tipped off by their questions, by their references to gay people they know, by their excited – or grossed- out – expressions. This may never change, but I don’t have to perpetuate that tunnel vision with my own speech. Usage of the word gay gets my goat too. Since when is gay applied only to men? I’ve been gay since I was 15. And, frankly, it was a little easier to think of myself as gay than as homosexual or lesbian when I first came out. Both of those words were fraught with centuries of negative baggage. Today, I’d rather be a dyke or queer than a lesbian, but I always want to be gay. I’m so happy gay, I’d rather have been born a gay man than a straight woman. How to stop the journalists from using the phrase “lesbians and gay men”? Can we say “gay people”? Or “gay women and men”? It is nice when they lead with the female words; we’ve come a long way since women weren’t even newsworthy. Now even gay women are included in mainstream stories now and then. While it’s true that, as a writer, I may be oversensitive to words, language has always been a powerful tool used for good and bad, to oppress or to free, to imprison in stereotypes and to declare independence from them. One of the best known objectionable words is “boy,” used to strip adulthood from black men. Slang is often a weapon, as when bullies toss around words like “fag” and “sissy.” The gay way of life is frequently called “unhealthy.” What the heck does that mean? Unhealthy for whom? We can be lazy with language, using shortcuts that become code words to signal disapproval. It’s hard to watch what we say. The brilliant and brave Mary Daly was a revolutionary of words, revealing their clout in our speech by dissecting them. The very title of her book Gyn/Ecology (1988) plays with a deeper meaning. Daly’s presentation of such words as “a-maz-ing" opened my eyes to what I am really talking about. I think of the term “stag-nation," as she explains it in Wickedary (1987). It may sound like I am griping and need to quit sweating the small stuff. In actuality, I am protesting the misconstruction of our words, misconstruing of our lives and the surrender of queers to labeling by outsiders and insiders. We take back the night, we take up our cause. Now we need to take back our words, because they are still being used against us. Copyright Lee Lynch January 2012 |
| Viral Victimization I always thought I’d suffered my first few weeks of college. It was horrible, I was completely unprepared, but I survived. Instead of getting on a train and taking Tyler Clementi’s long jump, I got on a train and went to my big brother’s office to announce that I was quitting school. What was I thinking? What did I expect my brother to do? Was I thinking? No; I was just feeling and what I felt must have been similar to what drove Tyler off his bridge: despair, fear, hopelessness, humiliation, shame, blinding desire, loneliness, desperation. You can’t think when you’re a seething vat of emotions and hormones. You can’t make a good decision. You just want to end the pain. Like Tyler, I was assigned a straight roommate my first semester. Like Tyler’s roommate, mine lived in a world so extremely foreign to me we could have been different species. She wanted to become a fashion designer, marry a nice boy, move back to Pennsylvania and raise a family. I wanted to become a writer, fall in love with a thousand girls, move back to New York City and drink like Dylan Thomas. Instead of web cams back then, we had gossip. I dressed like someone out of the Beebo Brinker stories in Bermuda shorts, knee sox and Oxford cloth shirts. I was the only student, female or male, to bring my bicycle to campus, and listened to FM radio jazz, not rock and roll. Like Tyler, I was just plain different. I learned later that the other students shunned me, made fun of me, whispered about me. There were three of us weirdos on my dorm floor. I was the queer one, although in 1963 nice girls barely knew what that meant. The first night in our new lives, my roommate and I went to a freshman mixer together. It was packed, loud, filled with that foreign gender, boys. I backed off, lost the roommate, left immediately. Outside, on the strange campus that still appears in my nightmares, I was as alone as any being on this planet had ever been. I was as alone as Tyler Clementi. Thank goodness the romance of the bridge - Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge, Walt Whitman’s “Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul” – was not a romance that drew me. I simply knew I would get nothing but confusion and misery from four years in the alien land of hetero-college and that I would do better on my own. On the other hand, I suspected those years were not the worst thing that could happen to a young gay. College was a privilege. The relative cloistering might have been a cosseted cushion between childhood and the demands of adulthood. It was not. Maturity gives us an anonymity and freedom to crash and burn that’s hard to achieve in the micro-world of school. Tyler knew he couldn’t stay at Rutgers and escape the condemnation and ridicule his roommate’s boorish video- assault would bring. Maybe he hadn’t been through and hardened by castigation and bullying before. Clearly, he had fewer defenses than I had. Already, I’d toughed out the schoolyard hounding. Already, I knew there was a community out there, if I could just get to it. Already, I was on medications to still my fears. And I reached out to my semi-sensible brother who reached out to my sensible father. I said nothing about being a pariah. How can you tell your family a thing like that? I only told them I wanted to get a job and live in the city, that college was a waste for me. At my father’s urging, I gave school one more try. My poor innocent roommate avoided me. Complained about my drunken late nights. Never came back after that first semester. An artist down the hall invited me to room with her and we’re still fast friends. I found a sort of girlfriend and spent many weekends in the city, feeling like an outsider in the gay bars, but the gossamer thread of my soul at least could anchor there. Oh, Tyler, how I wish I, or someone, could have been your guardian angel through those hellish weeks. Mine was a straight male upperclassman named Jonathan who liked my writing, hung out with me and impressed my tormentors with his motorcycle, marijuana and getting kicked out of Columbia University. The other weirdo girls left school, but I made it through. I was lucky: Jonathan and his anti-establishment literary friends, all my elders, took me under their wings and kept my victimization from going viral. They became my life-saving, not lethal, bridge. Copyright Lee Lynch April 2012 |