HOW MUCH DID YOU SAVE? HOW MUCH DID YOU GIVE?

A dear friend and I still marvel at our luck in snagging lawyers as life partners. Given our white, working class upbringings, being “married” to a lawyer is equivalent to making it in the world. Truth be told, my parents never dreamed of announcing my marriage in the New York Times, that was beyond our class, but the dream of marrying a lawyer? That was something to which we all could aspire.

This aspiration for my friend and I, and the resulting giddiness in our partnered success, reflects the pronounced interest in America for the answer to this question: How much do you make?

When the answer to the question, How much do you earn?, is revealed, it often shocks people. Regardless of what the number is, stating how much one earns transgresses a taboo. Our own earnings, or lack thereof, is a source of great anxiety in American culture.

How much do you make? isn’t a question that we ask directly, of course. It is a question of the speculative realm. We talk about it with family and friends. Consider when you start dating someone new. Who asked you, Does he have a good job? Does she make a lot of money? We aspire to building a life based on love, but we also have an eye, and a mind, to money.

I don’t think that there is anything wrong with that fundamentally, but I do think the focus on the question, How much do you make?, must be coupled with two other questions of equal, and perhaps greater, importance. Those two questions are: How much did you save? and How much did you give?

I think of these questions at this time of year in particular as the April 15th deadline for personal income taxes looms. In my household, our taxes are filed, and I’m over the rage of not being able to file jointly—it’s an annual source of rage.

Honestly, I tell myself each year that I am not going to let it bother me, but the reality is when I’m sitting in front of the computer with piles of paper everywhere trying to sort out and separate our completely entangled financial lives, I always feel angry about the lack of recognition of our conjoint life.

Then I rationalize that many married couples have to evaluate what has the greatest financial benefit to file jointly or to file married, filing singly. I understand that there are tax benefits to not being married, but I, like many queers at this time I suspect, want the choice—or at least the recognition that my life is not single.

After this rage and resignation process, however, I file my taxes. The total value of my remunerative work is revealed and for at least the next year, I know the answer to the question, How much do I earn?

What I don’t know is: How much did I save? According to the news, saving should be important to Americans. The headlines tell me that savings rates for Americans is at the lowest ever. Perhaps part of that is that because we don’t have a system to highlight how much we save in any given year. There is no line on the tax form for how much we saved.

The other question, How much did you give?, for me goes hand in hand with earning and saving. Giving money to benefit broader society is a profound American tradition. When we give, we invest in something that can only be accomplished collectively, something that is beyond our individual capacity to earn or save.

There’s a line on itemized tax forms for how much is given to some organizations, but our capacity is to give is greater than can be contained on any line from the IRS, as is our capacity to save.

While filing taxes, I’m thinking about earning, but more importantly about saving and giving. I believe they are much greater measures of our worth and our value.


Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #26 dated April 15, 2008 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 667

THE ROTTEN AND THE BLISS

It took Jodie Foster long enough, but in December 2007, she finally did it. Jodie Foster came out at the Women in Entertainment Breakfast receiving the Sherry Lansing Award when she thanked her partner Cydney Bernard, who “sticks with me through the rotten and the bliss.”

“The rotten and the bliss” seems to me one of the great configurations for the long-term lesbian relationship. I can list a million of the things that are rotten about relationships. Monday mornings, which inevitably involve going to work after a blissful weekend together, stress about money and jobs, spats about how to clean houses, care for animals, organize household activities. Disagreements about money or new sofas. Indecision about holidays or how to spend a spare four hours. The list could go on.

Thank goodness, it is also just as easy to list the bliss. Coming home to a beloved after hard days at work. Seeing someone else smile at your achievements. Flowers for no reason at all. Celebratory dinners. Secrets. Inside jokes. Belly laughter about these inside jokes and secrets. Fond memories. Vacation snapshots. All of these things are the basis of a long term relationship. All of these things are the bliss—the things that provide fun and laughter in the lives of two people together.

Jodie Foster understands the rotten in long-term relationships and the bliss. Some of us have been waiting for many years for her to acknowledge that she is a lesbian and in a long-term relationship with another woman. I admit, I thought that the final disclosure would be more dramatic and important than it actually was.

Jodie Foster’s acknowledgement of her lesbianism and her intimate partnership was simply a brief statement—a brief acknowledgement in the acceptance of an award of her lifetime together with another woman. Still, it did seem to many of us that the heavens opened with cherubim singing. Perhaps I exaggerate for effect. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll take it. However, Jodie Foster comes out, I’ll celebrate. I want more celebrities to come out, and I’ve been watching celebrities come out long enough that I’ll take any celebration wherever I can get it.

I do think, however, that the moment of waiting for celebrities to come out has basically passed. George Clooney is playing with us with his coy conversations about “Gay, gay, gay.” (The third one, according to Clooney, is going just too far). In another tabloid, Clooney suggests that if Brad Pitt was a woman and he was a woman and each were lesbians. . . well, you know what they mean. Clooney plays with our expectations and our hopes for him as a gay man. The era of denials has ended. The era of coyness has begin.

The dramatic coming out adventures of Melissa Etheridge, “YES, I AM,” or Ellen Degeneres on the cover of Newsweek, “YUP, I’M GAY,” are over. What we have instead are the oblique confirmations from celebrities of what we knew all along.

As celebrities no longer feel the need to “come out” we can only hope that they also eschew the need to stay “in the closet.” Openness and honesty was always what our revolution was about. As we now begin to experience it more and more, we’ll have to readjust our expectations, for our celebrities heroes, and, perhaps more importantly, for ourselves.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and activist living in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is installment #20 in CIVILesbianIZATION dated 8 April 2008.

SAPPHO – THE MOTHER OF US ALL

I’ve been reading about Sappho. She’s been a cult figure in the lesbian community for over a century now. One of my associations with Sappho is the book, Sappho Was a Right On Woman. While Sappho has been an inspiration to lesbians for decades, I’m also learning that she has been inspiring to many poets and writers – not just lesbians. There is a rich literary history of poems, stories, and plays inspired by Sappho’s life and legacy.

All of this I knew and it’s been delightful to explore further; what I didn’t know and was surprised to learn is that Sappho is said to have committed suicide. This has caused me much reflection over the past weeks. What does it mean for us as a lesbian community to base our central iconology on a woman who committed suicide?

On one hand, it is not surprising. There are ample references over the past one hundred years of suicide among lesbians. I’m particularly thinking of The Well of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall and my new favorite book, Olivia by Olivia. The tragic lesbian figure, unable to find love and driven to end her own life is a part of our cultural history and memory. It is a consequence of the pervasive sexism and homophobia with which lesbians have lived. It is an experience that we have to respect and understand.

I think that the image of the tragic lesbian has changed, however. In fact, I posit that Sappho Was a Right On Woman, published in 1972, is one of the first books in change and rewrite our lesbian history and identity. During the 1970s and 1980s, the image of the lesbian as lonely, isolated and perverse was whittled away by the growing community of lesbians and women-identified women. As a result of this community, the image of the suicidal lesbian was overcome. I even wonder if was put to rest for perpetuity. (Though, realistically, reading history regularly, I’m aware that it is highly repetitive and cyclical: the tragic lesbian seems certain to return again.)

Perpetuity or not, the lesbian has now been positioned in our society as not a woman who is lonely and suicidal but a woman who is surrounded by a strong and loyal community. As we look back through history, I think that this image of the lesbian reached its apex at some point during the 1980s. Perhaps when Cris Williamson and Meg Christian performed at Carnegie Hall; perhaps during the second March on Washington in 1987. Whenever it occurred, lesbians over the short course of a few decades remade themselves from the women molded after a suicidal Sappho to the women molded after an empowered, autonomous, independent, and happy Sappho.

This is the Sappho that we’ll embrace for now, but knowing the history of it is important to me. Since the apex of this particular incarnation of Sappho, we’ve been going through additional transformations of our selves and our collective self-images. Some of the forces at play include identity configurations of queer and transgender. I have come to think that our current identity formation of “empowered Sapphos” is part of what makes the lesbian community, and particularly lesbian feminist communities, important flashpoints for the working through of these new identities of queer and transgender. Challenges to lesbian separatism are a way for a variety of other identity formations to receive validation from a “community” and from the “empowered Sapphics.”

Sappho’s poems only exist today in fragments. No matter how we understand our lives and our identities, we are building them from fragments of an ancient poet and from a narrative that is by and large lost and simply pieced together from various historical and literary sources. The strength of this is we can continue to reinvent ourselves and our identities from this fragmented past. We can and we will—lesbian identity will continue to be challenged, reformulated, and reconfigured.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #19 dated April 3, 2008 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

PREGNANT MEN—NOT THE REVOLUTION WE IMAGINED, BUT REVOLUTIONARY NONETHELESS

Reproductive technologies are creating new opportunities and new challenges – not only for people who want to be parents, but for the broader communities in which we live as we strive to understand what parenthood means in the twenty-first century. A current flashpoint of these contemporary anxieties is captured in the story of Thomas Beatie and his first person account of being a pregnant man in a recent issue of The Advocate.

Beatie, who lives with his wife in the Pacific northwest, is pregnant with their child, a healthy baby girl, due to be delivered this summer. Beatie writes compellingly about his pregnancy and his desire to be a parent, calling this desire, not a male or female desire, but a human desire. I’m happy for Beatie and his wife and the upcoming addition to their family. What I’ve found interesting, and surprising, is the reactions of friends and the popular media around me.

I hadn’t really read the story in The Advocate, though I had seen some blog mentions of it, when I heard a full discussion of the story on the local hip hop radio station at the gym. I admit, that I braced myself as I sat in the weight room between abdominal repetitions. I was expecting some sort of homophobic and transphobic screed. What I heard instead was a fascinating conversation about the reactions of the two radio hosts. Let me be plain, they did not embrace Thomas’ pregnancy. They expressed confusion and astonishment, but they did so in a way that seemed to me concordant with the uniqueness of the situation. It isn’t everyday that a man is pregnant. They discussed the operational aspects of the pregnancy including the details of Thomas’ transition. They expressed concern about the baby’s health, but read the portion of the article in which Thomas said that the baby was healthy and seemed reassured by that. Overall, the discussion was honest, informative, and interested in the situation. By it’s conclusion, the two hosts, while affirming that their were things that they didn’t understand about the arrangement, wished Thomas and his wife the best with their child. This wasn’t what I expected from a mainstream radio station.

The other discussions that I have been involved with have been with lesbians and bisexual women. The reactions, particularly from lesbians, have been surprising more negative than the reactions from the radio hosts. How can a man be pregnant? Is this the right thing to do to the child? Why don’t they adopt? While I feel that there is legitimacy to all of those questions and that asking them is just fine, I’m surprised by the tone and intention behind the questions. Rather than a general curiosity about the conditions and circumstances of the “pregnant man,” I’ve felt that the impulse is more to ensure that men are excluded from child-bearing and that transgender men, in particular are excluded.

As I’ve read the news and thought about it, I continue to be excited for Thomas and his wife about their pregnancy. Questions about the child’s health and well-being are uniformly met with responses from people in the medical profession that the child should be perfectly normal regardless of the fact that her birth parent took testosterone. Any effects of the testosterone will be in the normal range of human sexual organs. (A normal range, which for me includes a variety of sexual orientations and gender identities). Adoptions for this couple—and other transgender couples as well as in many locations gay, bisexual, and lesbian couples and polyamorous couples or others who organize their erotic and sexual lives outside of the binary heterosexual partnership—as a result of the homophobia and transphobia in the adoption system would not be an option. Pregnancy was their option for having children, and I support reproductive rights—that is the possibilities of controlling one’s own reproductive organs and the decision-making concomitant with them—for everyone, regardless of other aspects of their lives and identities.

Increasingly over this century I think that reproductive questions and questions of queer rights and equality will continue to intersect. I hope that we think about them in ways that are careful and respectful and congruent with our larger quest for equality.

Thomas Beatie’s article in The Advocate
http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail.asp?id=52947&page=1

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #18 dated March 29, 2008 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

ONE OF MY SISTERS DOESN’T LOOK LIKE ME

For me, one of the things that defines family is comfort. Certainly love is a part of the definition of family, but, for me, comfort is more foundational. Comfort comes from spending time with people over extended periods. Not necessarily large amounts of time, but repeated, focused amounts of time over a number of years. From comfort comes caring and compassion and the ability to freely express oneself without pretense. It is then that the ties that I call familial begin to emerge.

My wife has a sister who is now seventeen. For the past handful of years, we’ve spent a week with her at spring break and we regularly talk on the phone and on IM. After our years together, I consider her my sister, not just my wife’s sister.

This past year, in anticipation of her visit, I told people that my sister would be here. For those that asked, I gave them the more detailed explanation of her being my wife’s half-sister (they share only a father), but for most people, just the statement, my sister is coming, was enough. Besides, they could see the joy in my eyes as I anticipated her visit.

When they met her, however, it was clear that something was different. This sister, you see, is of African-American heritage. I don’t think much of it, but I’m aware that people look at us oddly for a moment when I introduce her as my sister.

When people had that reaction, I didn’t much care. I gave them a little bit of time to assimilate the information and unless they asked, I didn’t offer much more. Sisterhood seems like it should stand without explanation.

Nowadays, I think we’re far too invested in families looking alike. It may have been significant in the past when people moved less, had more children, and marriages lasted longer. Today, however, most people I know have family cobbled together not entirely by biology.

Half-sisters, step-siblings, in-laws, and out-laws all characterize modern families. Combine those relations with increasing adoptions across races, cultures, and nationalities and throw in more interracial relationships and interracial families through a variety of means, and suddenly how we look does not determine if we are a family.

In my envisioned future, family isn’t about who looks like whom, but rather where is your comfort. Still, I’m not the norm. I cannot tell you how many times I hear or read about women who want a child who looks like them or their partners. I’ve heard lesbians looking for sperm from a man who shares physical characteristics with the woman who is to carry the child or the woman who is to be the “non-bio” parent. Sometimes the degree of focus on physical and genetic characteristics seems to me to eclipse the nature of our humanity. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on reproductive medicine to produce children who share physical characteristics with parents. Is how our children look worth all of that money?

I think it’s time to discard all of these associations of physical appearance with familial relationships. It’s as dated as Wally and the Beaver. Continuing to believe that shared physical attributes mark family is like continuing to believe that Rock Hudson was off screen the heterosexual lothario that he was on.

One of my sisters doesn’t look like me. I love her no less, and I’m waiting for the day when I introduce her in public – to cashiers or friends or casually on the street – and no one raises an eyebrow. There is no pregnant pause because everyone realizes that family is not defined by biology or genes, but by the strength of our affection for, our commitment to and our comfort with one another.



Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #17 dated December 11, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

MARKING OUR BODIES Remaking Our Lives

When I was coming out, a tattoo and a doubly-pierced right ear was a sign of being a lesbian. This seems silly now, I admit, but at twenty and twenty-one these were important identity expressions to my peer group and me along with Birkenstocks, thick wool socks (I came out in Michigan), and large army fatigues held up with wide leather belts. To this day, when I wear that uniform, I feel like a real lesbian.

Each generation defines itself with physical and external markers of identity. All have profound meaning to the people who are marked and to the people who create the marks. I welcome new generational markers – even if I don’t always understand them. (I admit, tongue piercing and navel piercing were initially uncomfortable and foreign to me; though I remember the way some recoiled from my large, comfortable shoes.) I only become concerned when the markers of identity result in permanent and unchangeable actions to our bodies.

I’ve taken those actions. One tattoo and three holes between my two earlobes. Do I regret either? No. Would I do it again? Perhaps not.

Part of my discomfort comes from feminism. As a feminist, I want to embrace my body as it is – and I want other people to do that. As a feminist, I’m uncomfortable with breast augmentation. I don’t think that permanent body alterations are something to support or celebrate. I hold this philosophy to a pretty strict standard in my life. Sure, I’ve shaven my legs on occasion (and the wifey wishes I would do it more, truth be told), but I’ve not done much that permanently alters my body.

This brings me to my concern: increasing people – and particularly young people, which to me still means under thirty-five or forty – are chosing to transition from one sex to another. On one hand, I support people’s ability to have control over their bodies and to express gender in whatever way that they wish. On the other hand, I’m concerned about permanent body alterations.

I worry about the increasing medicalization of our bodies and of gender. Women and queers have never been served by the medical establishment and yet increasing it seems we turn to doctors to give us bodies to help navigate a world in which gender roles are narrow prescribed and offer little fluidity and flexibility for a moment or a lifetime.

Our experience of gender and gender roles is related not only to how we understand the world personally but also to how other around us understand and interpret the world. Lots of the butch women I came out with twenty years ago embraced their butchness because of a feminist analysis which said that gender roles weren’t working – for women or for men, but that it was fine to be gender non-conforming. Today these same women might be told by prevailing analyses that their identity is transgender. That’s fine—if it is an identity that works, I support people’s ability to self-identify. Today, however, more is at stake than self-identity. People are changing their bodies and their sex through medical intervention.

That concerns me. I’m worried about a construction of gender that requires permanent body alteration. My body isn’t perfect as it is and I do things to change it – I change my clothes, I work out, I use lotions and lots of little potions from small pots, but all of that can be undone in a short amount of time – none of it is permanent. Are we sure that surgery and hormone therapy to permanently alter the body is an essential expression of gender identity?

Many won’t be happy that I’ve asked the question, but I think it must be asked. We need dialogue about the costs and benefits of medical interventions and the constructions of sex and gender in our queer community.

Meanwhile, I’ve dispensed with the second earring in my ear. I loved it for the years that I wore it. Today it doesn’t serve me. I’m glad that I could just stop wearing it when I wanted. I want for all of the other young queers to have the same choices as their lives change and evolve.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet. She lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #16 dated November 27, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 698

WILL CONGRESS EVER PASS PRO-LGBT LEGISLATION? Reflections on ENDA

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) passed out of the House of Representatives on November 7, 2007 with a vote of 235-184. In order to become law, it must of course also pass the Senate and be signed by the President. Most anticipate that those two things will not happen this legislative cycle. The version of ENDA that was voted out of the House is one that many advocates object to because it excluded gender identity language, which would have provided workplace protections to transgender people.

There has been an entire brouhaha surrounding ENDA that’s been mostly documented in the blogosphere though The New York Times article provided a good summary of it as well. I’ve watched these events unfold with astonishment. First, I am incredibly proud of the GLBT movement for standing on principle. The actions of United ENDA and the nearly four hundred organizations that worked to preserve gender identity in the bill are awe inspiring to me. I have never in my twenty years of being a participant / observer seen the queer community speak with such a united and clear voice. I am inspired by the number of organizations who have taken a stand in support of a transgender inclusive ENDA and called on their members to do the same. This is the movement about which I dreamed; I am proud to be a part of it.

I was amazed and slightly baffled by Representative Barney Frank’s actions. It seems that he had the opportunity to demonstrate the perfect “object lesson” about the value of Democrats to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community, but that it has now been botched. Generally, yes, queers vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Lately, however, people like me—and others—question that loyalty in light of the waffling of Democrats on marriage. The script that could have played out is this: ENDA passes in the Senate and the House and then is vetoed by the President. The House and Senate are run by Democrats; the President is a Republican. Who will you vote for in 2008? The answer would have been obvious.

Instead, we were embroiled in wrangling with politicians about pragmatism and principle. It seems to me that politics should be about both, and politicians should find ways to hold onto both pragmatism and principle at all times. Ironically, one of the politicians who first introduced the law to protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination, in 1974 on the fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, was Representative Bella Abzug, the gentlewoman from New York. She was a politician with vision able to be both pragmatic and rooted in principle.

Instead of a transcendent political moment, or even an instructive political moment, the passage of ENDA was a divisive political moment. Certainly, the opposition to excluding gender identity from the bill was inspiring, to me and others, but the outcome was disheartening.

An important “object lesson” could still emerge from ENDA in 2007. That lesson may be more enlightening and may, in the long run, catapult queer liberation forward. I don’t think that it is going to be one that strengthens or stabilizes queer support for a Democratic candidate for President. Rather the lesson may be about unity, loyalty, and commitment. I hope that we are able to see it and learn it.


Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet. She lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #15 dated November 13, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 552