Today was a national day of action protesting the passage Prop. 8 which takes away the right to marry that the court had found gay men and lesbians to possess under the pre-discriminatory, pre-8 constitution of the State of California. (And protesting other discriminatory laws voted in this historic election.)  Everyone I knew was going over to San Francisco (if they didn’t already live there) or going over to Oakland (if they didn’t already live there). Angie, Leo, Charlie and I went to Berkeley. It was a nicely timed action–pre-nap–and nicely placed, right beside the Farmer’s Market where we go most Saturday mornings anyway to buy stone fruit and eat organic Thai food. To my surprise, there were maybe a couple of hundred people there. It was quite impressive. I couldn’t help but wonder where all these people were when Angie and Scott were alone on the overpass before the election trying to get the message out.

Angie says (referencing success guru Tony Robbins) that it is easier to pursue someone who has stolen $25,000 dollars from you than it is to work to save $25,000. In other words, people will put enormous effort into recovering something that has been taken away, even when they shirk the same effort that will save it in the first place. Is this true? I’ve certainly known a person or two who was like that when it came to relationships . . .

I don’t really know that these people weren’t standing on street corners, making phone calls and donating money before the election. I do know that we feel that we could have done more. I think it felt a lot worse to lose the right to be married than I expected it would. An old friend wrote with a historic perspective on how far we’ve come, etc. etc., and I know that is true. I know that we will have the right to marry, probably in my lifetime. But having your rights stripped still feels frightening as well as infuriating. The last time my people (different group) had their rights stripped, it was prelude to genocide.

So that’s the dark note. But today, people did turn out–all over the country. My mother is visiting Washington, D.C., and she went to a protest there in the pouring rain.

Just now, I went trolling over to Andrew Sullivan’s blog to see if I could dredge up his comments about not getting so caught up in this loss, but instead taking a more historical perspective. Instead, I was treated to a world tour of people in cities and small towns who came out today to protest for civil rights!

Check in out: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2224950/35797320

I got all excited. How amazing to see this become an international movement. I have to say, I am also loving having an electronic community. This morning, my old friend Becky, from college, was briefly in town and stopped by to have breakfast. We are in touch with so many of our friends and comrades from college now, via Facebook: it’s time to plan a big reunion for our collective houses and activist groups from back in the day. Since we don’t all stay in the same town we grew up in (and please note that I am writing from the house my parents were living in when I was born), our tribal minds get a little lost in all this coming and going. But now I get to tuck myself in each night with bedtime stories and sweet dream status updates from people I have loved for a long, long time. And all around the world, people came out to say: this is what the world is going to look like, and you (H8ers) can’t stop it.

And it feels different, in fact. Everywhere I go, I have the feeling that people recognize my family in a way that they didn’t always before. They may have voted against us, but we aren’t invisible anymore, and that makes a big difference. Because to know us is to love us . . .  Actually, just because it is exhausting to have to explain oneself all the time or let oneself be invisible. The Mormon Church just spent $19 million dollars educating Californians on the fact that there are all kinds of lesbians and gay men who get married and have children. It isn’t radical, in one profound way, but it is a heck of a lot more comfortable than being asked (as one woman who knew we were “a two-mom family” asked us), are you sisters?

(Now I have to slog out another 1500 words on my novel of the month. More on writing in my next blog.)

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

I never intended this to be a political blog. Still less did I intend it to be a blog about marriage, of all things. But sometimes you get seized by a political moment. It’s made writing my novel hard, although I am about to land my narrator in McCarthy-era Los Angeles, so maybe I can fuel all of these feelings right into the story. Never thought of that!

First, let me say that I am OVERJOYED about Obama’s election. This is past-due and gives me a renewed faith in this country. I really didn’t think we’d be willing to elect an intelligent man president . . .

I am so angry that I even have to think about the probable passage of Prop. 8 and the lawsuits these reactionary people have already filed to annul my marriage. This is a time of celebration and hope, and I am sitting here wiping crap pie off of my face.

So I want to talk about the practice of writing. Writing every day. Whether you feel like it or not. Whether you like how it’s going or not. Whether you have time, energy, inspiration or a clue. Much like parenting, this is the only way to develop a relationship with writing that will sustain it and you over the long haul. I have not done this always, and for that reason, I have accomplished more as an editor and a teacher than as a writer. But in the times when I do it–and this is one of them–I break through the romance of writing and take it up as a responsibility (to myself, because who else cares, really, at this point in the drafting?).

Imagining being a writer and actually writing are two such different experiences as to have almost no commonality. It’s like the first year of being a parent (at least when you have two): you have no time or capability for understanding or analyzing your experience. You are just living it, moment after moment, diaper after diaper, feeding after feeding, nap after nap, story after story, meal after meal, laundry load after laundry load, grocery shop after grocery shop . . . Wanting children is all about desire and imagination and feelings (sometimes hard feelings, when it isn’t going well). Having children, at least at first, has very little to do with any of that (except when the hormones through you over the emotional edge).

And yet, having children has connected me to myself and a sense of being human that has transformed me. It’s not a splashy transformation. Few people even know about it, I would guess, since I don’t have time or energy to telephone people anymore, and when you meet me at the park, I am running five different directions at once and conversations are choppy at best. Anyway, I think this is true of writing, too, and I’m not sure how I feel about it: paragraph after paragraph, attempt after attempt, each sentence structure, the lousy voice of judgment harping on in the background while the fingers move and move, the mind hoping for some combination of complete, transcendent brilliance and extra time left at the end of the evening to watch Californication.

Maybe changing the world works the same way. Conversation after conversation, rally after rally, defeat after defeat, the highs, the lows, a kind of daily commitment to believing that things can be other than they are, that things should be other than they are. One day, you look up, and there is a stack of manuscript pages in the printer, a grown-up person who was once your little jumping bean, and a President of the United States of America, whose own parents, like my sons’ parents, could not have gotten married at the time of his birth in 1961 in sixteen states in the Union.

This morning, Angie went down to our local freeway overpass to hold NO ON 8 signs, alongside the imported yes on 8ers. The boys and I started to clean the house, and then we got a call from Angie that the yessers had huge signs strung all along the fencing, and she was there with only one other person.

So I called someone and she called someone and then I called my mom. Then I changed diapers and went off to drop the boys at a park with my mom and join Angie. By the time I got there, there were just two yes guys and their one big yellow sign, and several older women (my mom’s age) had shown up and were pressing a no on 8 sign against the fence, with the wind pushing back at them. I held a big tarp sign with a woman who teaches at Los Positas Community College. She told me that many of her students were voting for the first time today.

It was freezing on the overpass, and while we got a lot of thumbs up and honking from the west-to-east side, the folks going the other direction–who had the yellow yes sign to react to as well–seemed a lot more conservative.

I found myself feeling so angry. I wanted to turn to those yes on 8 men and say, “What does it feel like to be on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of family and the wrong side of Christianity??” They seemed more jovial than I–sort of that “we’re all in this together” feeling that you can get when everyone is pressing signs against the wind, and streams of traffic are gushing under your feet, shaking the cement structure on which you stand. I did not share their joviality, perhaps because this is my family and my marriage we are voting on.

This could be the most momentous, historic occasion of my entire life, past and future, if things go my way. If things go really, really wrong, I’m going to feel like getting out of here, though some folks on Talk of the Nation today suggested that this was an unsportsman-like attitude. In general, my slogan is that of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”  But I do want to keep my loved ones on one side of that line for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, I’ve pounded out 6017 words on my novel in the past three days. (I will start chugging on my next 1667-2000  words when I finish this blog.)  I always say that it is easier to write than to think about writing, but of course it’s easiest of all to do neither. At the same time, I get irritable and draggy when I stop writing for long enough. My father used to say, “If only coffee tasted the way it smells . . . ” (Angie says that it does, but then she is on a slippery coffee slope.) I wish that writing felt like reading feels.

The closest I get to that is when I just keep writing, past the extreme judgments of my inner editor (how come my inner editor is in there with my inner child and she still has time and brain power to be so harsh and detailed? Shouldn’t she be changing diapers or something?), past the hiccups and the slow, uphill inclines, past the raging uncertainty . . . and did I mention the judgments?

I think critics, inner and otherwise, are a little like yes on 8ers. They are angry and negative about something that really had nothing to do with them. There are, for example, a certain number of people who are really angry about NaNoWriMo. They say that it brings thousands of crappy manuscripts into a world overrun with manuscripts and makes thousands of people believe that they are writers when they are not. And the people opposed to gay marriage seem to feel that marriage is unravelling if all these extra people get to get married, as if we are producing shoddy relationships in a world overrun with relationships . . . Okay, I might be working too hard or not hard enough at this metaphor. I am sugar-filled and caffine-walloped and sleep-deprived, so I hope you can bear with me.

What I am trying to say is that people writing crappy manuscripts and people creating unorthodox relationships are NOT A THREAT to the establishment. People who write crappy manuscripts are more likely to buy published books and to read them well. People who are getting up together each day to figure out how to make breakfast, get everyone dressed and out the door, keep the house clean and the laundry done, make a living and have quality time with the children and each other are not ripping at the fabric of traditional marriage.

One literary-political note. In plots, when things are looking really good for the hero and you’re fifteen, twenty minutes from the end of the movie or, say, a quarter of the way to an eighth of the way to the end of the book, what are you thinking?

You’re thinking, in the immortal words of my sons, Uh oh. We know the rhythms of plot so well when we are consuming it (creating it is a different story for some of us). It does not bode well for our guy when things are looking up too far out from the end. And it’s been going well for Obama for a while now. Better and better. I hope that real life will do as it often does and rebutt our understanding of plot and just soar right on to victory.

Because it felt incredible to walk around Whole Foods today, grocery shopping, and look at all the people who populate my world and think, “We just might be electing an African-American man president today.” I want my boys to come to consciousness with a man of color in the White house. I want them to think that if it was ever another way, that was a long time ago, back in the last century . . . Besides which, our Cobra insurance coverage runs out next year, and it would be great to have an alternative to Kaiser . . .

I have yet one more undeveloped thought. As you know, we’ve never made any kind of reparations to the many Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in this country. I know that Obama may not be one of these, except possibly on his mother’s side, since we are all quite a lot more mixed up than we pretend. But it occurs to me that all this fear of “redistribution of the wealth” taps into a national knowledge that the original distribution of the wealth was acquired by theft and murder, and that a Black president might look at reparations in an entirely different way. I think the fear of redistribution of the wealth is a fear of honest reparations being raised as a real issue–some seriously messed up mortages coming due with a big balloon payment.

But walking around today, I felt excited. I felt like we might be able to do something far beyond reparations, and move right on over to fairness and representation and something that actually looks like democracy.

Day One. All day, I knew it: this was the day I would start. Angie took the boys downstairs when they woke up at about 6:15, and I got to sleep in until  a.m. As I was coming to consciousness, I was thinking my way through Aristotle’s incline vis-a-vis my new novel. I have been doing this over the past few days, never getting further than the first turning point, but this morning I got to the midpoint before I crawled out of bed.

Then we were packing and getting ready to come up to Sonoma, plus I had to post podcasts and technique boosts and jump starts to my class of folks who were also starting their novels today. My mother came over to play with the boys while Angie and I got things done, because it takes us about a million years to pack for one of these three day trips. We always bring too much of everything except the things we need. It takes us weeks to unpack. In fact, I had to unpack from our last Sonoma jaunt in order to empty a suitcase for this trip.

This is relevant to the craft issues that are the titled focus of this blog. Two journeys were planned to begin today, and my morning was preoccupied in packing for them, with precisely the same set of problems: planning a trip/ novel and actually making one are two very different projects, and from the standpoint of one, it is difficult to remember what one actually needs when immersed in the other.

It rained today. The boys barely know what rain is, we’ve had so little of it in their lifetimes. But today was a real California storm, and we drove through grey skies, over swaths of water, across the Richmond bridge. By the time we got to Sebastopol, I had to let Angie drive because I was so tired. Once she was at the wheel, I kept falling asleep–into deep, sudden, real sleep–only to be jolted awake by a sudden stop or the disturbances of the rain.

And then we were here, the house full of the smell of bread pudding, the boys elated to see Grandpa and Nana. (Grandpa reassuring Angie about Prop. 8: “Even if it doesn’t pass this time, it’s going to happen. It takes a while for us old codgers to catch up.”) Angie and I got to go back into town, to Cooperfield’s bookstore, on our own, and suddenly I was full of energy, and so many amazing books were being sold at double-discounts that my arms, normally weighted with babies, were weighted with books. That feeling kept stealing over me: today is the day. I am starting this book today.

I didn’t like the book anymore, abstractly in my head, but I knew well enough to know that it would feel differently coming out on the screen, on the electronic page, that it would surprise me and find room for anything that mattered to me. I felt in love with the millions of books in the world.

It was cold outside and so warm when we got back to the house, and now tangy orange flavors and salty tamari scents layered into the bread pudding smells from earlier, and the boys looked up, happy to see us but not unhappy that we’d been gone, and I knew: today is the day I will start.

I kept checking my email to see if any of my students had posted a call for help or anything else. We fed the boys. They are saying so many words now. Charlie says, “bear” as if it were two syllables but something like “be-er.” And then “more” rhymes with “be-er.” “Me-re,” he says, frequently. “Mere.”

“Writing is mere,” Annie Dillard says in her wonderful book The Writing Life. The full quote is something like, “Literature is merely literature; writing is mere.”

I wrestled the boys into clean diapers and fuzzy pajamas, and they said nighty-night to the dogs and to Grandpa and Nana, and we sang them their three songs, plus we sang them Tumble Bumble since we didn’t read to them like we usually do.

Leo had a hard time falling asleep. He kept pointing to the fire in the wood-burning stove, and when Grandpa came out looking for his glasses, Leo jumped up, filled with ecstacy at the reappearance of this man he adores, and all-in-all, he was not pleased with settling down for bed, but finally–and really, in not so long a time–he was asleep. It took a little cuddling with Mama on one side and Mommy on the other to do the trick. And while he was struggling and I was shushing him and nursing him and petting him, I was thinking about the opening scene of the novel I was about to begin, and about what I’d worked out when I’d finally typed out my whole Aristotle’s incline that afternoon before the bookstore trip.

Then Leo was asleep and I could get up again and finally have my chocolate chip bread pudding with bourbon sauce, and tell myself that when I reached 1,000 words, I could have seconds, and so I began. At 820 words, I was still thinking about the bread pudding, which in fact had made its way into the novel, but then I was at 1352 before I actually got up to carve myself a piece, and now I am done with my first 1946 words. I need to do 1667/ day to achieve the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 in November, but more like 2000 – 2500 to achieve my own goal . . . We’ll see.

Right now, I am pleased. I am sitting at the marble countertop on the island in the middle of the kitchen/ living room. The boys are asleep to my right. The fire behind me is dying out. Angie is typing a few feet to my left.

There are people who rail against amateurs writing novels and claiming to be writers and thinking they know something about the writing life–people who hate NaNoWriMo and everything it stands for. But I think we are all amateurs when we face the blank page at the start of a new project. None of us is certain that anyone else will care about what we’ve written, much less need it in any way. There is the root of love hidden in that word, and we all do well to remember the excitement of being a beginner–whether for this lifetime or this novel or this day.

Dear Readers (and now I know you are out there),

I am posting an email Angie sent out today. Angie is my lawfully wedded spouse (at least until Tuesday) and the love of my life (for always). Push is coming to shove about Prop. 8: the yessers have been caught blackmailing businesses, lying, and shouting hate speech at gay men and lesbians. This is no longer “only” a civil rights issue; it is also going to have a big impact on the acceptance or rejection of violence, prejudice and externalized hatred of a group of people. Yes, it is a group of people to which I–along with many of my loved ones–belong. I take it personally when a stranger tells me to find God and a man because I am depraved. I take it personally when I hear that Pro-8 protesters were shouting, “dyke” and “fag” to passersby at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, CA. But I hope you take it personally, too. Because, as the pastor said, if you don’t speak up when they are coming for us, who will be left to speak up when they are coming for you?

On a somewhat lighter note, Angie is offering Limericks for donations to No on 8. Here is her email:

As most of you know, I’m  not a big sender outer of mass emails. And I’m
even less a big sender outer of requests, especially for money. Today, for
selfish and unselfish reasons, I’m taking a step outside of my normal chill
and let chill attitude and asking you for help. And I’m a little sweaty
doing it, so bear with me.

Obviously, I’m opposed to Proposition 8. You’ve probably already heard about
the blackmailing of businesses in San Diego, the lies in the television ads,
the number of community leaders, politicians and celebrities that oppose
this amendment to the California constitution. And maybe, if you’re in
California, you voted or plan to vote against the proposition. If you did or
will, thank you.  MoveOn.org has just posted a $3 million goal just to MATCH
the funding our opposition currently has going into this high visibility
weekend.

So, I’ll make you a deal. Donate to http://noon8.org. Or
http://www.eqca.org. Talk to your friends about supporting gay and lesbian
families in California, even if you don’t live here.

In return, not only will you have the warm fuzzy feeling you get from being
on the right side of history, I will personally write anyone who donates $25
or more a limerick. If you donate $100, I’ll even make it funny. Topic of
your choice. Of course,I have no way of knowing if you donated, you just let
me know. Send me an email that says “Gimme a Limerick, Lady!” or “This had
better be funny” in the subject line. Heck, if you’d prefer a short video on
the sexy parts of plants, I can arrange it. [Note from Ed.: I have linked to my contact and will forward responses to Angie. You may also comment on this blog to receive your Limerick.]

Thank you for your help in this crazy time and I hope everyone has a great
election weekend. And feel free to pass this offer on to anyone you know.

Angie

Next blog we’ll get back to craft with thoughts on late-life genius and cranking out a novel fast . . .

Last night we watched part of the new Chris Rock comedy special. Let me say, first of all, that the man is funny as heck. We were laughing hard. He had a lot to say about Obama that was not only funny but astute and telling. He’s also smart–he can read the audience and respond to that “uh-oh” feeling that comes from listening to edgy humor that takes no prisoners.

Angie and I were talking this morning about the part where Chris Rock said that if Obama were president, Black people could stop giving their kids the “you can be anything you want to be” speech every morning before they leave the house. He said, White people don’t give their kids that speech, because it’s obvious. This led Angie and me to discuss (not for the first time) the fact that we are raising two little white boys. They could be president, even in the old days (and let’s hope they are nearly over) when only little white boys could grow up to be president. Then we talked about whether having two lesbian moms would be enough of a handicap to prevent them from being president, and whether Clinton’s (Bill, that is) single mom and alcoholic step-dad were equivalent to having lesbian mothers. I said no; Angie said yes.

This is what we do with our free time while the boys are with their babysitter.

Then we go to the library, sit at the long wooden tables, and get to work. Around us, the economy is tanking, and taking us with it for the ride, I suppose, but we are all paid up on our library fines and have a clean slate when it comes to borrowing all the wealth in this bank of books. Wee-ha!

Just for the record, my mother did give me that speech, since I was a little white (half-Jewish) kid, but also a girl, and it wasn’t so obvious that I could be anything I wanted to be. Except as a reader.

Yeah–there’s the tie in to fiction: the gateway to success for those not wedded too closely to reality. Funnily enough, this is also exactly what most people–interviewers, say, or even readers–refuse to understand fully about writing fiction: characters can be invented out of the thick swirl of internal and external experience, out of the “what if” musings that run rampant in junior high kids like I was, for example, out of that feeling that who you actually are is a quirky twist of fate rather than a destiny, that you might as easily have arrived over there, in that body, in that life.

There but for fortune, we say, but is the fortune always good? I guess this is another confession: every time I hear a piece of someone else’s life, I zip into it and feel around for the fit. I overhear someone say that she’d finished her dissertation after twelve years. First thought: I should get a PhD. Someone writes to me from Kansas City with a look at living in a place that doesn’t value questioning over hierarchy as he feels the Bay Area does, but in an aside he mentions the lower cost of living. First thought: We could buy a house in Kansas City.

In life, I’m a bit of a push-over, then; indecisive and open to all manner of possibilities. My therapist seems to think (it’s hard to be sure between his nodding and questions and my own projections) that this has to do with my fear of committing to one life trajectory, since a single trajectory inevitably ends. Whereas Zeno’s paradox assures us that if we are jumping point to point, halfway to halfway to halfway again, we will never reach the end. In life, this is kind of weak, I suppose. But for the fiction writer, this same waffling, wafting search is like pumping iron for the imagination. I. Could. Be. Anything.

Sure, I can’t be everything. In life, I may only be able to be a handful of things (and some people might succeed in amending the constitution of the state just to prevent one of those things, so Vote No on Prop. 8). But there are lives ahead of me as a writer.

Borges said it better in “Everything and Nothing,” a piece out of Labyrinths which my father read aloud to me one day in what was then his living room and is now mine (speaking of changes . . .). My father had this sonorous voice, hushed in reverence to its own power, and when he read this I felt deeply understood. Which is not to compare myself to Shakespeare or Borges, but only to toss my headpiece in with the rest of the writers, to say, I live by my greatest weakness, which is that I cannot pick one life for good.

I am on vacation. It’s a working vacation, in that I brought the kids and their attendant need to eat and have their diapers changed and go places to play, and I brought my computer and the online course I am teaching and my blog and everything else that can now e-follow me wherever I go. But still, this afternoon Angie and I left the kids with Grandpa and Nana and went into town to have a milkshake and hang out in the bookstore, Copperfields, which happens to be wonderful. And I have spent the past two mornings in a park on Valentine’s Street in Sebastopol, meeting conversational, open-minded, intelligent mothers (and a few fathers)  and their charges and the occasional friendly dog.

Maybe it’s because Sebastopol is a small town, but being in the park here is like being at a brunch. You really talk to people. Everyone who comes into the park smiles at you. There is a strong sense that we are all here together. Not just co-existing as we pass each other in our busy lives, but sharing an experience together.

Being at a park in Berkeley–especially Totland–is more like being at a dance club. There’s a lot going on–movement, frenzy, action–and you may smile at someone and then you may not smile at someone else and you might dance by someone and talk to another person and even buy a drink for a third, but most of the people there are involved with their own groups and it’s too loud to talk for long or to everybody.

Maybe it’s the way this Valentine park is designed. Maybe it’s the slightly lower cost of living here. Maybe it’s just my being on vacation, being relaxed. I loved it, whatever it was.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been a little overwhelmed. Launching an online course, working with editing clients, getting ready to write a novel next month, taking care of my little fellows, figuring out childcare options, watching my insufficient retirement resources (which, honestly, I am using now instead of when I am old, when I fully expect to be working until I die) plummet in quantity, dealing with trying to get married before the out-of-state Mormons yank my right to do so away, trying to get to picture-lock on my short film so it can be finished and sent out into the world, shoring up my old and falling apart house, not to mention cleaning it . . . I don’t know . . . I’m feeling tired.

Chai lattes help. Showers help. Vacations help. Grandparents help a lot. But I have again been reminded of the root of all my misery. I haven’t been reading novels.

I read The New Yorker, and I read some blogs, and I read Egri and this and that from my piles, but for some reason, I read novels in spats. I’ll read four in a couple of weeks and then go back to The New Yorker. Today, I picked up a couple of volumes at Copperfield’s, and just now, I cracked one, and suddenly . . . I relaxed.

It’s as if I trained, as a child, to lead these other lives, in secret gardens and dumb waiters, in attics and at Paddington Station and in Milwaukee and on the prairie and inside the walls of houses, with spools for tables and buttons for platters*. I learned to expect complications and growth and some resolution. The tangled threads of my own life, with its confusion of themes and uneven character arcs, bewilder the reader I am, first and foremost.

Entering the world of a book, the voice of the narrator capturing my attention, the story drawing itself across my imagination, makes everything feel right again. In a book, I know what to do, the right kind of attention to pay. An ardor rises up in me, a feeling of connecting to life itself, a life full (but not reeking) of meaning. Attending to it is pleasurable and worthwhile and productive.

I suppose that I am at my best as a writer when I feel that way about the actual world itself, when I can peruse the vegetables at the market with the same passion for sensate detail and follow the chaos at the playground with the same curiosity about humanity, believing that in time, it will all be ordered into a thing of beauty and character, into a story. And that surely I will be the one to do it.

*The first three people to name the greatest number of the books alluded to in this list,  will win free, transferable tuition to my Gathering Your Materials course. To enter, email me the list and your name and contact information by Oct. 20th Thanks.

I am in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, typing on the computer, while my mother-in-law cooks dinner and Angie kisses the boys’ little feet. This sentence, I suppose, is what strikes fear in the hearts of the out-of-state Mormons who are flooding the supporters of Proposition 8 with funds–25 million dollars so far, to be exact. Somehow, my having a mother-in-law (cooking dinner) and a father-in-law (out hunting!) and a spouse (female and monitoring two boys opening kitchen cabinets) and two sons (exploring Grandpa and Nana’s house) shakes the very foundations of their marriages. All marriages. Except, I guess, my own.

And it is National Coming Out Day.

When I graduated from my M.F.A. program, Ian McKellen (Sir Ian to you) gave the commencement address. (Is that what it is called? Angie and my mother-in-law and I cannot quite agree.) Anyway, he had come out relatively recently, given his age (this was in the mid-nineties and he’s sixty-nine now. You do the math; this is a blog about writing). And he said, Come out, in every way that you can. And support your gay and lesbian family members so that they can come out. There I was, with my whole New York family–cousins of my father who, like my father, were born in the 1920s–and they were being extolled by a world-famous, brilliant actor to come out and to support me in coming out. It was splendid.

If I was worth my salt as a blogger, I would find and scan the photograph of Sir Ian and me (and my partner at the time) on the steps of the School of the Arts. But I am a writer, so I will just tell you that I wore a blue flowered dress, and Sir Ian and my former partner wore suits, and behind us bricks lead up to the stone steps and huge glass doors, and my lipstick is a bit overly bright red, but I am twenty-five and the world owes me a living.

Well, no. That was my father: when, at twenty-one, he graduated from medical school, he sat back at his commencement ceremony and thought, “Now the world owes me a living.” When I earned my M.F.A. in writing, I had no such illusions. But I will venture to say that the world owes me some civil rights.

Here are a couple of things I want to say to people who oppose my right to marry on the basis that it somehow threatens their own marriages or notion of marriage: if homosexuality cannot be stamped out by death, the threat of death, ostracization, beatings, derision, exclusion, legal and religious persecution, an absence of representation, and so forth, I really don’t think heterosexuality is in grave danger from gay marriage. And if your kid sees my family and learns something new is possible, the life saved may be your kid’s.

Meanwhile, if you are a writer (or a reader or, really, anyone): come out, in any way necessary for you. Be vivid. Be quirky. Be honest. Be strange. Admit that you want to write. Admit that you love this particular book or that particular song. Confess your joy at sitting in the park with someone who makes you laugh. You know that your capacity for love, like mine, extends beyond the bounds of what you’ve been taught or offered, that it is an enormous force that can create sonnets and children and some very awkward voice mail messages. Say so.

Happy Coming Out Day!

To donate to NO on PROP 8 — and counter those out-of-state Mormons, click here. Spread the word!

One good reason to vote NO on Prop. 8 (which would take away the right that gay men and lesbians now have to marry in the state of California) is that it’s putting an enormous amount of pressure on some of us to get married before election day in November, in order that we might be “grandfathered in” even if the right to marry gets overturned. How crazy is that?

Another reason is that it’s always nice to be on the side of social justice, civil rights and history. It just looks better. Your grandchildren aren’t going to think twice about gay people getting married, but they will look askance at those who opposed their right to do so.

Let’s say that it is true–somehow, though I can’t for the life of me imagine how it would be true–that my marriage weakens other, heterosexual marriages. Maybe some woman sees my spouse in the park playing with the kids while I sit, at a nearby picnic table, typing on my computer. She says to herself, “It is not even Sunday afternoon, and that woman’s spouse is playing with the kids. That is so unfair. I want to take away her right to be married to that person. And if I can’t do that, I want to go home and pick a fight with my own spouse, who never goes to the park on a Wednesday (most likely because he’s busy earning more money than I could in the same job).” So begins the fighting, the acrimony . . . and soon it’s divorce time. All because of my little lesbian marriage. Okay. I can imagine it . . . sort of . . .

Let’s say that’s true. Even if it’s true that granting me my civil rights threatens your marriage . . . drum roll . . . that is not a good reason not to grant me those rights. Have you ever read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin? You can find it online . . http://harelbarzilai.org/words/omelas.txt

It’s a powerful piece of writing that imagines a utopian society based on the suffering of only one child. LeGuin’s narrator speculates about how hard it is for us to imagine happy people who are not childlike and naive. The narrator nearly negotiates with the reader as to how Omelas’ society would function: drugs, perhaps? Religion but no clergy; a sense of victory but no soldiers. Festivals are taking place, some Renaissance in feel, some more Summer of Love. (The story was published in 1974.)

Finally, as if to make one last effort to convince us of the existence of Omelas, the narrator tells us about the child, locked in what amounts to a janitor’s closet, ignored, enfeebled. Every once in a while, the door to the damp room opens and someone throws food in, while more people look on without speaking.

"If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of
that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted,
that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done,
in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and
delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those
are the terms." (quotes are drawn from the web site given)

LeGuin has a vivid description of the rage and disgust of the children of Omelas when they learn about the suffering child upon whom their happiness and the beauty of their society rest, and then about the way they digest their feelings, and “their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and accept it.”

However, there is one more thing that the narrator has to describe. From time to time one of the adolescents, after seeing the child for the first or second time, or one of the adults of a sudden, will leave Omelas, and walk away alone.

“The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot descibe it at all. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

Rereading the story for the upteenth time (I’ve even taught it before), I feel as if I understand it better than ever. Perhaps it is because I have found myself accepting the “terrible justice of reality,” trading it for youthful idealism and constant frustration. Perhaps it is because I am attempting to use the story to make the argument to those who believe that marriage is a beautiful and perfect institution built for a man and a woman that they should walk away from their utopia if it necessarily rests on the unhappiness of my people, on the pain of my sons, on the limitations of my civil rights.

LeGuin suggests that the place where people refuse to build their joy on the suffering of even one other person is a place harder to imagine than that joyful utopia, but if you are willing to set out in that direction, you will find your footsteps sure.

Read about Prop. 8:

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=California_Proposition_8_(2008)

http://www.noonprop8.com/home

as well as countless “Christian” web sites and reports of out-of-state money pouring in to defeat Prop. 8.