WHAT’S YOUR ANNIVERSARY?

By Kate McLachlan

What’s your anniversary?

That’s always been a loaded question for any same-sex couple. Anniversary of what? Denied the right to have a wedding anniversary, we’ve engineered our own anniversaries. First kiss, first sex, the date we moved in together, the date we had that private commitment ceremony out on Point Whatchamacallit with no one but God as our witness. Sometimes our anniversaries commemorate dates so private we can’t share them, so we don’t even admit them to people who ask. Opposite sex couples don’t have this problem. They may fondly remember their first kiss or the date they moved in together, but once they marry, their marriage date overtakes all others and becomes paramount. What’s your anniversary, you ask? That’s easy, they say. It’s the date they got married.

Not so for same-sex couples.

Washington State passed Referendum 74 on November 6, 2012, and the measure will be ratified 30 days later, on December 6, 2012. On that date same-sex couples will be allowed to apply for marriage licenses in Washington. We have a 3-day waiting period here, though, between license and wedding, so December 9, 2012, is the first date same-sex couples can legally marry in Washington. You might expect, then, that a lot of same-sex couples in Washington will have anniversary dates of December 9, 2012, or perhaps December 12, 2012, for the 12³ crowd.

JANE AUSTEN HAS A FACEBOOK PAGE! Or, Privacy is Dead

by Kate McLachlan

Hey, have you heard the news? Jane Austen has a Facebook page!

                As soon as I found out, I immediately ‘Liked’ her because I love her and it makes me feel closer to her now that we’re “Friends.” Can one ever get close enough to Jane? Real intimacy has been difficult, though, because, well, she’s been dead for nearly 200 years. Besides that, nearly all her private letters were destroyed after her death, and nobody even really knows what she looked like. Out of her very large family, she’s the only one who never had a portrait done, except for one brother who was apparently ‘developmentally delayed’, to use a modern term. Rumor has it Jane may have been (gulp) ugly, and the family didn’t want to waste good money on a portrait to memorialize that.

                In any case, Jane probably preferred the anonymity. She was a very private lady. But that’s all right, because now she has a Facebook page!

You know what else? When I found out Jane had a Facebook page, I checked to see if one of my other long-dead favorite authors might have one too, and she did. Georgette Heyer, the icon of Regency romances, who refused to give interviews and once famously said, “My private life concerns no one but myself and my family,” now has a Facebook page. Guess what, Georgette? Your private life concerns all of us now.

Random Wondering

By Renee Bess

What follows is a series of random thoughts or “mind wonderings” I was able to capture as they floated by. Thanks for allowing me to share them with you.

• ·         I wonder what it’s like to be a woman at the RNC and know one of the party’s platform planks denies your sovereignty over your own body. What’s it like to be a black GOP’er and know many of the other convention attendees hold you in the same low regard they hold President Obama simply because you share the President’s ethnicity? What’s it like for the LGBT Republicans who know some members of the party’s faithful believe you can pray away the gay while others wish you would disappear altogether? What’s it like to be a black LGBT Republican convention-goer? Never mind. My brain is starting to hurt.

It’s All In A Name

by Cindy Bryerose

Ever been labeled? Ever labeled someone yourself?  Everyone’s done both, sometimes it’s a good thing and sometimes it’s a bad thing.  It starts from an early age and continues through life.  Even before we are born we are labeled as the baby, the wee one, the bundle of joy or my father’s favorite “another tax deduction.” As soon as we are born we are again labeled.  In my case it was baby girl Thorpe.  A few days later, my parents, finally settled on a name Cynthia Claire Thorpe, and promptly called me Cindy.  Is that another label? 

As children, we are given many labels; tomboy, sissy girl, freckled face, nosy, above average, chatty, and big head.  Believe me those are some of the polite ones.  Labels come at us from all directions, friends, family, teachers, and even people we don’t know.  How can someone who doesn’t even know me slap a label on me?  Everyone does including me; we have all seen someone in public and described them to someone else.  “I saw this lady in Wal-Mart who was so____________. “ Well you get the picture.  We like to label people. A nasty hangover from our past, perhaps, still causing headaches in the present.  So much for the old saying: United we stand, divided we fall.

Questions and Answers

By: Damian Serbu

I often think of the best answer to a reader’s question long after they ask it. As in, I do an appearance and reading, take questions from the audience and answer them, and then slap myself on the forehead on the way home or that night in bed when the more precise or eloquent response pops into my head.

When asked a deep and interesting question, I usually just look at people as bewildering thoughts run through my head, from something quite profound that gets frighteningly philosophical, to something more akin to what actually comes out of my mouth: “Interesting question. I suppose it’s different for each novel.” And then I run for the hills!

The Series That Ate My Brain In A Totally Good Way

By Andi Marquette

Hi, all. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Andi Marquette, and I write a mystery series at Regal Crest. That series is set in New Mexico, one of my home states.

The books alternate between main characters. That is, odd-numbered books feature, as the main character, sociologist/academic K.C. Fontero while even-numbered books feature Albuquerque police detective Chris Gutierrez, who is K.C.’s best friend. So in the series, no matter who the MC is, you’ll see a lot of the other characters coming and going through each other’s stories.

In Consideration of Age

    By Renee Bess                                 

   Do you tend to write about what you know, or do you expand your body of knowledge and research topics heretofore unknown to you? Do you create characters who are racially or socio-economically different from yourself, or do you avoid taking the risks inherent in that task?

     Many of the lesbian novels I read when I first came out offered me a mirror, but that mirror yielded an incomplete and somewhat distorted reflection of my realities. Within those books I found teachers, lawyers and bartenders, butch identified and femme leaning characters aplenty. But it wasn’t until I discovered the work of Audre Lorde, Ann Allen Shockley, Becky Birtha, Alexis DeVeaux, and Jewelle Gomez that I found a more accurate reflection of myself. During the black power era I neither read nor heard about Langston Hughes’ and James Baldwin’s true identities. And had I known Alice Walker was family, I would have enjoyed “The Color Purple” more profoundly than I did the first time I read it.

The Power of Symbolism

By Nann Dunne

Recently, I watched an episode of CSI: NY that had a scene that impressed me enough to stick in my mind. In the scene setup, the character Jo, a policewoman played by Sela Ward, accompanies a female witness home. Shortly after the woman goes into her bedroom to get some clothes, Jo calls out a question to her. When the woman doesn’t answer, Jo walks to the bedroom door. She sees the woman’s legs on the floor past the end of the bed. Jo draws her gun and slips into the room. She gets punched in the face, and the gun drops from her hand. Fade out. 

Fade in. Jo is lying on the living room floor, regaining awareness. A man, the serial rapist her unit has been pursuing, forces her to her feet, beats her with his fists, and slams her against a wall mirror. She falls to the floor, bleeding and barely conscious.