On Wisconsin: This Ain’t Over

Devil’s Lake, Little Devil

“This Ain’t Over” is the seventh and final chapter in The Gaytheist Gospel Hour’s series “On Wisconsin”.

Our Wisconsin visit, was, in the vernacular of the intellectually lazy and chronically slang-prone (guilty on both counts, Your Honor): AWESOME.  Kate, Mabel, and I communed with nature and crass commercialism alike, enjoyed the company of brilliant friends, confronted the forces of conformity and oppression, stared down death, and Helped The World.  We tripped through time. We made pahster tracks.  But as AWESOME as our visit was,  it wasn’t perfect.  When we packed up our tent and drove back over the Illinois state line, we suffered a couple casualties and left behind some unfinished business.

On Wisconsin: Fight Songs

There are two kinds of battle anthems: those in the Sousa idiom and the good kind.

“Fight Songs” is the sixth chapter in The Gaytheist Gospel Hour‘s seven part series “On Wisconsin.”

Here in the good ol’ USA, we love our college football fight songs. We like the boastful smack-talk of the lyrics, the militaristic marching band music, the purposeful feeling of “us vs. them” that pumps in our veins when we all sing along.  It could be argued that no other state in the union loves their college football fight song more than Wisconsin, which actually adapted theirs into the official state song.* “On, Wisconsin” is such an epitome of the fight song genre, it was once praised by none other than John Phillip Sousa himself, king of the marching band battle anthem.   It is a pretty rousing tune, if only for the fact it mentions the word “fight” four times in a single line.

But for my money, there’s no better fight song than the one recorded by Pat Benatar in 1979.  “Heartbreaker” dispenses with the jingoistic clap trap of the classic fight song and its attendant arms-forces hoo-hah and focuses directly on the “fuck you” core element of the fight at hand. 

How To Have A Right-On Civil Union

“Purple Gays, all in my brain! Lately, things, they don’t seem the same!” — Jimi Hendrix

On September 30, I entered into a civil union with Kate, my partner of nine years and mother of our four year-old daughter Mabel. We were able to do this not because we love eachother or because we have a demonstrated commitment to one another, but because we were lucky: lucky to live in one of a handful of states that allows some vestige of equality in marriage rights. Not everyone is as lucky as we are. It is my hope that one day, everyone will have the option to do as we did, and celebrate their respective partnerships in a Right-On Civil Union. The following is a list of suggestions compiled from our own Right-On Civil Union (plus money-saving Hard Times Bonus Tips!).  I humbly present the following list to those of you who may wish to follow in our footsteps and/or learn from our mistakes.

Summer Scrapbook 2011

Click to magnify the majestic mightiness that is this self aggrandizing landscape photo.

The Summer of 2011 has been a most majestic and mighty season, rife with victory, spiced with bravado.  It is a rump roast sliced from the hind quarters of a noble beast (perhaps a liger), turning on a spit over the fires of glory.  As we savor it, our hearts swell with secondhand triumph made bittersweet by the piquance of sorrow, for despite its lush and verdant beauty, its free-floating firefly constellations at night, the dancing gold of its lakes, ponds, and oceans by day, each succulent bite consumed brings us ever closer to the simultaneous bitch slap/nut punch/horrifying full nelson of winter.

For me, the Summer of 2011 was a barely-averted altercation with a stranger at a camp store.  It was hiking the rocky bluffs at Devil’s Lake in Wisconsin.  It was almost getting my ass kicked at the Am Vet’s Lodge in Higgin’s Lake Michigan. Yet it was so much more. This summer brought the Resurrection of Santa’s Village kiddie amusement park, a jaunt to the Circus World Museum, an encounter with John Muir‘s clock, as well as the Ghost of Peter Falk.

Without a doubt, my particular cut of this delicious creature was rich and rewarding.   I pay tribute to it today in the only way a middle-aged midwestern woman such as myself knows how: in scrapbook format.

A Marriage Of Mass Destruction

It’s been an exciting week.  In a stunning and historical turn of events, the Illinois Legislature has voted to allow civil unions for gay people.  It’s a law that will soon permit me and every other gay person in the state to destroy the institution of marriage…by entering into an institution very similar to marriage.

I know.  It’s crazy, it’s a little hard to follow, but that’s the conservative line on the issue.  Not being a conservative myself, I can’t pretend to understand their ideology.  I just know that they’ve invested in us a power beyond my puny minority-mindset comprehension: the power to destroy everything for everyone by simply doing it.