pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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SODOMY SHIRT

41.

One of the questions on my compatibility survey is

WHAT THREE PEOPLE, LIVING OR DEAD, WOULD YOU MOST WANT TO HAVE DINNER WITH AND WHY?

My original answer was Randall Terry, so that I can kill him, but then I decided to be serious. (And you'll just have to take the survey if you want to know my final three guests.)

Another game question is

IF YOU WERE ON A PLANE THAT WAS GOING TO CRASH, WHO WOULD YOU MOST WANT IN THE SEAT BESIDE YOU?

Now some pals say their lovers, but I wouldn't want my lover to die just for my comfort, so my answer, again, is Randall Terry—because then the stinker would die. (Superman is a fine answer too though.)

My best pal and I ran into Randall Terry a lot back in the late eighties when she was making her award-winning documentary about abortion rights and coming down to DC all the time to do research at the Library of Congress.

The brilliant film she eventually made still provides her with bread-and-butter money, since so many women's studies courses use it each semester.

I gave her a place to crash, hauled film equipment around when I wasn't in class, talked and smoked with her on my front porch for hours, and stayed up many a night playing guitars and singing with her.

I participated in the LGB [this was before T enlightenment] direct-action group OUT! (Oppression under Target) sometimes back then and this group actively supported the pro-choice movement, even though a few members thought that this weakened our agenda.

I won't go into the merits of that argument here, since it seems obvious to me that legislation denying control of your body to one segment of the population must be opposed by groups that oppose other laws that would restrict what you do with your own body.

Most of OUT!'s direct actions centered around LGB rights and AIDS: Members protested at NIH in an effort to get more money dedicated to drug research, chained themselves to Congress to demand more money for AIDS research, staged die-ins on Pennsylvania Ave. to call attention to how many people die daily from AIDS (and to call attention to the need for more money for AIDS research), held candlelight vigils in front of the White House to symbolize all the people who had died of AIDS, and—and this is my favorite action—worked with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to reserve the park across the street from the Corcoran Museum after the museum pulled the Mapplethorpe exhibit, then wheat-paste the city advertising a Mapplethorpe show that we projected from the park across the street onto the exterior walls of the Corcoran.

Another favorite OUT! action involves us walking by a row of tourists waiting to tour the White House—we were there for something else and this was spur of the moment—and spontaneously chanting

We're here.
We're queer.
We're not touring the White House!

My group raced to a Baltimore clinic as soon as we got our assignment and were the first pro-choice protesters to arrive there. Some Operation Rescue folks were still arriving, too, but others had already formed a circle three rows deep around the building. (They do this so that, when one person is arrested, another person can move into that person's spot and they continue to hinder access to the building.)

We immediately formed a perpendicular line to cut off any more rings of their circle and I was at the front of this line, standing right beside the Operation Rescue people, who shoved us and yelled at us and held photographs of fetuses in our faces and held crosses up to our faces and screamed that we were murderers.

My agenda was to break their line while remaining nonviolent but, as one woman with a big gold cross continued yelling in my face, my agenda expanded to include figuring out how to get her and her spit out of my face in a nonviolent manner.

I finally arrived at my plan and, the next time she stuck a fetus photo in my face, I licked her arm.

Oh how I wish I had a photograph of the repulsed look that spread across her face! My plan worked though.

Well shit. My car alarm is going off. Hold on.

The so-called rescuers started singing Amazing Grace after we'd been there for a while, then knelt to pray, so I seized the opportunity and stepped across their line of three people and into a (karate) horse stance (which is very stable).

immediately, someone punched me in the backs of my knees and someone else leaned into my back and tried to knock me over.

My face and arms and leg wound up scraped down the clinic's brick wall, but I managed to stay upright thanks to my solid karate stance—and this means that I effectively broke their line.

(Take that, assholes!)

I got home later that afternoon to discover my roommates sitting on the sofa waiting for me.

What's up? I asked.

They played an answering machine from my father saying that my mother had attempted suicide. Again.

I had very little money back then, and so hopped the first Greyhound bus down to South Carolina, where she had been institutionalized.

I settled in, and a nice silver-haired woman who looked vaguely familiar sat down in front of me.

The woman was a talker and I didn't have my Walkman with me, so we chatted a bit and, at some point in the conversation, I realized that she was one of the so-called rescuers who had screamed "murderer" at us all morning.

At the moment, though, she was acting all grandmotherly toward me, asking about the scratches on my face and handing me slices of her orange because I looked hungry and asking if someone would be there to meet me when our bus pulled in after midnight.

I guess context is everything....

•

Okay, this is getting long, so I'll share two more fond OUT! memories and then sign off:

(1) The Sodomy Map: OUT! distributed maps of the US that included detailed descriptions of the various sodomy laws in each state that had them. I lived in a happenin' group house that threw some incredibly wild and wonderful parties, and we posted one of these maps on our refrigerator so that we and everyone who visited our house could initial each state in which we had committed sodomy. This resulted in friends rushing over to visit us after their vacations.

(2) The Sodomy T-shirt: Back then, Sue Hyde ran the sodomy campaign for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (and may still). She also dated one of my housemates, which is how we wound up brainstorming long and hard into the night trying to come up with a way to present a positive message about sodomy on a T-shirt.

This is what we finally came up with:

SO • DO • MY

So Do My lovers

So Do My friends

So Do My idols

SINGING IN THE SHOWER: Istanbul by They Might Be Giants. (Instanbul was Constantinople now it's Istanbul not Constantinople...)

READING: an article from The Progressive by John Ross: "Wal-Mart à la Mexicana": Wal-Mart puts down roots in the shadow of the Pyramid of the Sun in San Juan Teotihuacan. Is the global leviathan any match for Quetzalcoatl?

LISTENING TO: Thea Gilmore's fantastic cover of Crazy Love

9:27 a.m. - 2005-03-15

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