Marching home
/ was marching alongside a lot o f other tomboys, blocks and
blocks o f tomboys and sissies and butches and drag queens
B
Y
__ L E E
L
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hadn’t been to a gay pride march in six
years — which I now know is a mistake —
and I hadn’t been able to attend the March on
W ashington in the fall of 1987.1 was determined
to do what 1 could to swell the ranks of some
march somewhere in 1988.
About the same time that I made this decision
I also was coming to realize that after four years
o f living in Oregon, and eighteen before that of
living in Connecticut, I still thought of New
York City as my home. I had no intention of
living there again, and this year I would not
even set foot there closer than an airport. Wasn ’t
I
T
H
way back to New York, my beloved home
town. I'd drawn a picture of part of that
anger, o f a thirteen-year-old tomboy striding
past the city playground, and o f the teenagers on
the other side o f the chain-link fence yelling
“ Hey, butch!” at this kid w hodidn’teven know
what the word meant. “ Is it a boy?” they sang
every time I went by, ‘ “or is it a girl?’ ’ I wanted
to run, I wanted to kill, I wanted to hide some
where and never come out again.
I marched by them, helplessly swallowing
my an»er Who could I tell? It was true, I didn’t
“ Draw Yourself Out!’!,
A N N H IN D S , a rt m e d iu m
E
AMAZON
T R A I L
it about time that I settle, in both senses of the
word, on a place o f my own?
I could not bring myself to adopt southern
Oregon as home. It’s too hard to be queer here
— impossible to be openly queer. On the other
hand, I am not about to move away from Girl
friend, nor am I willing to abandon some of the
loveliest territory in the universe to fundamen
talist Christians, conservative survivalists and
macho methamphetamine manufacturers.
I was scheduled to attend San Francisco’s
Living Sober gathering again this year. It is, like
their gay pride parade, one o f the largest in the
country, and my experiences at both had been
gratifying, if a bit overwhelming. It struck me,
though, that this running to the major events in
the major cities where the major celebrities
spoke was not going to help me take root.
Maybe I should consider making my statements
where I live.
The first time I visited Portland I was not, to
say the least, impressed. It was little (popula
tion 366,383), it was inland, it was for the most
part flat and had no Castro, no Stonewall, no
Mardi G ras, no cobblestones or gay literary
history. It did have one tall building. Big fat
hairy deal, as Garfield would say.
Yet Portland’s Just Out, highly regarded by
the gay press industry, has loyally run this
column for more than three years. And
Portland’s A W om an’s Place Bookstore is one
o f the oldest in the country.
W hat’s more, the state is filled with maverick
women and men whom I admire enormously.
Billy Russo o f Roseburg quit his secure federal
job, cashed in his retirement and created Ruby
House, an AIDS hospice in a rural redneck
town o f 16,000. The state is famous for its
w om en’s land groups: Owl Farm in Days
Creek, W omanshare in Grants Pass, Rainbow’s
End in Roseburg, to name a few. The radical
faeries meet annually on Creekland, five miles
north o f where I live. Womanspirit magazine
lived its potent life here, and this was the birth
place o f RFD, the magazine for rural gay men.
Southern Oregon is also one o f the few
temperate places in America where I can make
enough o f a living on a part-time job that I can
write. This nesting process, I came to realize,
had to do with accepting who I was, what I
needed and what my life had become.
look like the other girls. My mother complained
about it all the time. What could I do? I was a
gay child in a hostile straight world full of boys
shouting insults.
1 marched by the teenagers again in Portland,
but I was marching alongside a lot o f other
tomboys, blocks and blocks o f tomboys and
sissies and butches and drag queens. The anger
was there, but it had finished its job for now: it
had driven me home and it was tempered with
relief and with joy.
•
274-9591
HAPPY HARVEST
So I made my decision. I would march as
close to home as possible — in Portland. And I
would celebrate my sobriety at Soberfaire, a
weekend o f meetings and workshops in Port
land. I would settle for Oregon to see if I could
settle in Oregon.
Soberfaire was just what I needed. It was
held in a neighborhood full of graceful older
apartment buildings, trees, and a commercial
strip where the gay and lesbian film festival was
blatantly advertised on a marquee. There were
between 200 and 250 people at Soberfaire. I
rem em ber that most o f the workshops I attended
at Living Sober in San Francisco had been so
large there had been a charismatic quality to
them. A leader or a well-spoken participant
would move the room to emotional heights, and
I felt as if each session had been highly cathartic,
revelatory, life-changing. It was what I’d
needed then.
In Portland, the groups were small. Not only
did I, Mizz Bashful ’88, feel a responsibility to
contribute by opening my mouth and sharing,
but I felt comfortable enough to do so. No one
walked around hugging teddy bears (although
I’d brought Easy Bear in case). I didn’t feel as if
I needed to. Soberfaire for me was not so much
about moving to new places in sobriety as
recognizing where I am.
One realization for me that came out of
Soberfaire was about anger. I ’d spent a lot of
time fuming about the people who were
organizing against gays in my small town. I’d
gotten a little obsessive about it and was
beginning to feel consumed by my anger. When
I talked about this at Soberfaire, one group
leader, also an alcoholism counselor, told a
story about how she realized that she could not
live in the small town where she had grown up.
She loved it, but like mine, it was bigoted and
ignorant. Her message, clearly, was that I had
choices. I could move.
Well, I was there because I’d decided not to
move. So I got angry at the group leader —
which I knew was silly. Maybe my problem was
not the bigots, but the anger itself. Maybe the
anger didn’t have a whole lot to do with the
bigots. Maybe if I could separate my anger from
that issue, then the actions I was taking because
o f it, to use up the angry energy, would finally
be able to do just that.
The next weekend I traveled to Portland
again for the Lesbian and Gay Pride March. It
was one o f the actions I’d planned to take to turn
my anger to good. I’d seen the anti-gay demon
strators back in my town during the week and
had been infuriated even further. They’d set up
a fortress outside the post office: a round table
with a beach umbrella to shade them from the
searing Oregon sun. I was ready to march.
I kept remembering what I’d realized the
week before, though, and had spent some time
identifying the source of my anger, which went
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• 21 • Augii« I988