Now that President Biden and Vice President Harris are in office, I’ve been able to have my first Covid 19 vaccine shot. It was no big deal. I went to our county fairgrounds expecting to be injected through my car window, the way I was tested. I thank my lucky stars the test was negative. I’m grateful to the medical profession that persisted in making tests and vaccines available despite the disinformation and profiteering of our former leaders.

Turned out, the vaccines were administered in the same exhibit building that’s used for our winter farmers’ market, a very familiar and reassuring space. The six-foot tables that usually serve to display crafts or local mushrooms and goat cheeses, were now place markers.

Two representatives of our Sheriff’s Mounted Posse, minus their mounts, stood at the door, masked and chatting with new arrivals. We weren’t exactly an unruly crowd—age seventy-five at the youngest—so there was little for them to do. Once inside, our temperatures were taken, we were sent along to show ID and turn in required paperwork. Some internet averse or disabled people filled out that paperwork on site, assisted by caretakers and community helpers.

One half hour was allotted for each group to be vaccinated. Firefighters led the way to makeshift corrals, maybe twelve foot by twelve foot, and to inadequately distanced folding chairs. No matter, it’s in the nature of groups to group, and people knew each other so there was never a chance some would voluntarily social distance, despite the fact that they were there to prevent dying in a pandemic.

The firefighters then deposited us, one at each end of the tables. I spotted non-gay neighbors in front of me and we cheerfully visited—at a distance. They’ve since invited me to ride with them for our second shots. That could have been fun and memorable, I thought later, especially if we gave one another the virus while enclosed in a car.

Which brought me back to the first inoculation I remember. I was in elementary school when American schoolchildren became guinea pigs for Dr. Salk’s vaccine. We waited on line outside the Flushing, Queens P.S. 20 gymnasium, in enforced quiet, dozens of solemn, worried kids. Personally, I was terrified of being shut inside an iron lung and welcomed the chance to avoid that fate.

The Covid 19 vaccines have emergency authorization; the polio shots were experimental. Some children received the actual inoculation, others a placebo. We filed into the gym and stopped at little stations staffed by who-knew-who. I asked this time, and confirmed that RNs were giving the Covid injections.

As Polio Pioneers, we received pins and certificates (which many of us still have, including me). Mothers of pupils volunteered to comfort us. I lucked out with a mom who put her arms around me and held me close during my ordeal. If I hadn’t already been a dyke, I would have become one from that experience alone—what pain?

The more recent injection was painless. For about two days afterward I couldn’t lift that arm without great discomfort, but as vulnerable elders, we accepted the necessity of inoculation with stoicism. There was a nurse for each row of recipients so those in the back were able to watch for horrendous reactions from the procedure. There were none.

The last corral was the observation room where we waited thirty minutes, in case we needed an epi pen or ambulance. The firefighters roamed among us, smiling and joking with people they knew, checking on us all. Eventually, we crammed together on line to schedule appointments for our second shots.

As a seasoned Polio Pioneer, sixty-odd years later, it strikes me as funny that I felt a little proud, just as I had in grade school, to be part of this mass health effort. There’s a bond now, between my neighbors and myself, that we went through the unknown together, that we believed in the science and the medicine and did our patriotic duty to keep America safe.

Before my observation period ended, I took a seat at one end of a long bench and exchanged greetings with a courageous man perhaps twenty-five years my senior. As I watched the clock, I considered myself lucky, way back when, to have received the real polio vaccine rather than the placebo. In the present, I know I’m lucky to have reached the current vaccine eligibility cutoff age. And lucky to have outlived the willful mismanagement of the Covid 19 pandemic.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2021 / February 2021

The post The Amazon Trail: COVID-19 Pioneer first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Oh, hell, what can I say at a time like this? Did we think they’d simply go away?

When angry white criminals occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon back on January 2, 2016, and the seven miscreants were charged with federal conspiracy and weapons violations only to go scot free;

When, in the 1980s and 1990s angry white Christians organized to legalize discrimination against their scapegoats-of-the-day, gays, in order to build a vast political machine;

When a woman was killed by a white supremacist at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia;

When people of color are daily, hourly, victims of “officers of the law”;

With Southern Poverty Law Conference workers putting their lives in jeopardy to identify and expose hate groups;

With the American Civil Liberties Union and its sister social justice organizations unendingly trying to bring equality to a country that can’t or won’t provide it for its citizens;

When sixty-four million voters choose a money-grubbing, power-grabbing, morally empty, strangely uneducated cheater to rule them, and make an American idol of him;

When you’re Jewish, or your skin isn’t white, or you’re female, or your affectional preference scares people enough to make you a threat and a target;

When Americans bomb their neighbors;

When it’s dangerous to represent the citizens who elected you—we need to pay attention. We need to acknowledge that anti-democratic power is quietly accruing and will lash out; will harm rather than protect this too-trusting nation.

These rightist protestors are angry that gays can marry, they’re angry about a woman, especially a woman of color, becoming our vice president. They’re angry because they can’t get ahead, can’t pay their medical bills, can’t put anything away for retirement. This anger is passed from generation to generation and as we become a more just and equal nation some of these Americans blame the newly enfranchised for taking away their jobs, or their right to be better than whoever is lowest on their totem poles. They’re striking back, but at the wrong people.

Right wing demonstrators apparently think wealthy Republicans represent them. Socially, they may. But it’s not affirmative action taking bread off their tables, it’s not gay marriage siphoning off the middle class. It’s not “satanic” Democrats lowering taxes on big business or cutting food stamps, gutting Medicaid, and threatening to weaken Medicare and Social Security. Democrats are not the ones passing laws to weaken unions nor are they making it easier to give U.S. jobs to countries guilty of child labor, sweatshops, and pitiful wages.

Republicans are for big business. There’s a mutually beneficial relationship there: corporations fund their political campaigns and elected officials do corporations’ bidding. Like voting to consider corporations equal to humans. The campaign donations are used, in part, to target voters who are told that Democrats, progressives, socialists, liberals, whatever trigger word works, are harming Americans. The demonization is passed through certain churches, through organizations like the N.R.A., through some charter schools, through media designed for the purpose of telling lies.

They spread lies that smeared intelligent and capable Hillary Clinton so thoroughly that an insecure, bankrupt-prone idiot who knows nothing about government, foreign affairs, economics—about anything necessary to the office of President of the United States—was elected. Now, because he pandered to the anger and frustration of a populace frightened of change, opposed to inclusiveness, looking for a miracle, they seem to believe an economic evangelist con man will lead the way to riches untold.

We should have expected it and done more to stop it. This is a capitalist nation. Nothing wrong with that. Except, when Republicans eased the restrictions on corporations, they unleashed a money-grubbing free-for-all.

Unfettered capitalism is greed, pure and simple. Greed for profit and greed for power. And that’s what we have today, universal greed. Instead of taking care of its citizens, our government feeds that greed, starving those it was supposed to serve and protect, telling them all the while who to blame. While destroying the economy for the average American, these shameless elected corporate automatons duped laid-off factory workers, ex-service people, unstable wanna-be rebel leaders. Duped them not into a revolution, but into murderous, cock-a-hoop self-sabotage.

The Republicans aren’t sitting in jails, the corporations aren’t sharing their riches. These dissenters, tools of a corporate, big brother world, aren’t going away. We, the people, cannot look away any more.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2021 / January 2021

Lee Lynch’s website is: http://www.leelynchwriter.com/

The post The Amazon Trail: All Along the Watchtower first appeared on Lesbian.com.

The year 2020 wasn’t a total bust except for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who should not have died or have been permanently harmed by Covid 19. In the U.S., many lay those deaths and disablements at the hands of the greedy, power hungry 2020 administration and its followers.

Personally, I’ve been taking inventory of the bad and the good with my sweetheart, and finding some surprises.

Yes, over seventy-four million Americans voted to keep the traitorous officials in office, but eighty-one million plus voted to restore our democracy.

There are arms-bearing fanatics at the gates, but they have served to expose long-entrenched enemies of this country: racism, misogyny, religious zealotry, fear of any kind of difference, from xenophobia to homophobia. I trust many Americans are finally acknowledging these defects in ourselves.

I couldn’t see my family this year, but I can call them without the long distance charges that accrued when I was a kid and my mother dialed her family once a week at low Friday night rates, if no one was on the party line.

To compound that loss, our much-loved niece is sick and in pain from cancer treatments, but the treatments will cure her and then she’s going to treat herself to Disneyland.

We lost our good and gorgeous gray cat Bolo, but we’ve adopted a shelter cat and a foster dog.

A long-term couple, old friends of ours, are no longer together, but are finding their ways.

Our perfect lesbian neighbors are moving away, but now are our fast friends and are trying to find a buyer compatible with us.

We endured colonoscopies, but have clean bills of health.

Covid isolation made me put on the pounds, but I’ve already lost more than I gained.

My sweetheart has a demanding job with long hours, but with her sacrifice, we can afford our goofy, loving cat and dog.

We had to give up feeding seed and suet to the birds when rodents discovered the food source—and our house—but our sugar water feeders were so swarmed by hummingbirds that everyone, from friends to delivery people, delighted in coming to our door. The hummers outnumbered humans enough to relax their shimmery bodies and let us watch them from inches away. Other neighbors provided for the birds we lost.

The roof needs replacing like, last summer, but by staying home we’ve saved enough money to get it done next spring.

Our neighborhood cancelled the monthly potlucks, but I’m no longer exposed to that ridiculous number of homemade desserts.

Speaking of food, the women’s lunch, the Mexican lunch, the men’s breakfast, and worst of all, Butches’ Night Out—all were cancelled in 2020, but have I mentioned my clothes suddenly stopped shrinking?

My county just entered the extreme risk category for COVID, but I know no one who has gotten sick and we tested negative, thanks to our ability to isolate.

A beloved old friend died, but we had one last joyous visit in the mountains around Crater Lake in Oregon before her last decline and her spouse is going to, slowly, be alright.

Top conferences like the Golden Crown Literary Society and Saints and Sinners went virtual. I missed getting together with friends, other readers, and writers, but the popularization of Zoom and Duo and Skype have strangely given us perhaps more in depth encounters than hurried lunches and large group dinners.

Shopping became an infrequent, rushed chore, but impulse buying, useless accumulation, and shopping as fun may help save the planet.

Between the plague and the threat of a Totalitarian state, I feared my time on earth had been shortened, and it still might be, but day to day I’ve had more time than ever to finish a book, start another, be with my sweetheart, and just be.

For me, the word “but” has become synonymous with the word “gratitude,” as in: the 2020 occupier of the White House severely damaged our country and my gratitude to everyone who helped oust him is strong—no buts about it.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2020

The post The Amazon Trail: But … first appeared on Lesbian.com.

I thought there could be no good news.

Not in the midst of a pandemic and the mass selfishness that hastens and continues its spread.

Not when the abiding depth of U.S. racism bubbles to the surface without shame or remedy.

Not when the vainglorious puppet of the far right “that struts and frets his hour upon the stage” continues to assault everything we’ve done right as a country and tout as successful every evil we continue to perpetrate.

Even as this circus of horrors rolls on, I have been able to privately celebrate two personal milestones. I have broken my record for a long-term relationship. Only by a week so far, but what a relief to get beyond the jinxed anniversaries of my past. My sweetheart and I have started our fourteenth year together and we’re okay. Really okay.

Earlier this year I hurtled over a second pitfall: I now have lived in the same home for over seven years. At age eighteen I was privileged enough to leave my parents’ apartment and attend college. In the span of the next fifty years, I moved twenty-three more times. Not a world-shattering amount, but enough to necessitate recreating home, and sometimes my life, far too often. A number of the moves came as a result of break-ups, or of trying to make a relationship work.

It’s true that I want to change the world, but there is much to be said for stability. I was always performing at top speed, always devising ways to use time more efficiently, keeping sleep to a minimum. Only now am I beginning to learn to do one thing at a time—multi-tasking was normal and necessary. My pace was an attempt to make up for the hours and energy I too frequently lost to moving out, moving in, breaking up, starting again.

Short-term relationships seemed to be the norm in lesbian life at the time. It would be decades before I met women who had been together since high school or college or since coming out. The first such couple I met said the secret to their success was simply, “Be kind and love each other.” I had already foresworn leaving relationships and I taught myself to do as the couple advised. But it wasn’t always up to me to pull the plug. So I moved, and moved, and moved on.

My heart longs for solutions to the various wrongheaded conflicts tearing our world apart. Who am I kidding? These frictions have always been our inheritance. Racism is not new, nor is income inequality or incompetent, power hungry leadership. All are plagues, as malignant as the current viral scourge.

I see our single friends suffering from lack of companionship, touch, and safety, to evade this illness. African Americans, Native Americans, and gays, among others in the U.S., have never been guaranteed safety at all. Neither have my sweetheart and I, but we, at least, have respite in each other.

More than ever, I am grateful to have at long last found unwavering love and a home where it can thrive. While constancy won’t slow the rise of fascism, or appease alt-right activists, or allow us to go without masks, we are stronger for it, and strength is what is needed to repel the advance of the recurring infamies we now -— and perhaps always -— face.

Copyright 2020 Lee Lynch / June 2020

The post The Amazon Trail: A Personal Silver Lining first appeared on Lesbian.com.

It’s that time again. I need to find a healthcare provider.

I live in a rural community where there is a large turnover of medical professionals and a constant shortage of qualified staff. The health organization that provides these services seems to have difficulty attracting talent. It’s common knowledge in the communities it covers that it’s a tough employer to work with.

Which isn’t to say there are not entirely competent professionals devoted to their patients and performing at least as well as their big city peers. I’m the one who’s chosen to live where the question, “Is there a doctor in the house?” may well go unanswered.

My primary provider is pursuing the next step in her career—a step at a deservedly higher altitude. She’s a Physician Assistant, but I couldn’t trust someone with a full medical degree more. She’s perfectly straight, yet never blanched when the issue of my queerness came up. Although she was not taking new patients at the time, she graciously made room for my sweetheart in her practice. How will we ever replace her?

Of course, I asked the same thing when my former doctor left. We all loved her. Once, I had to go into her office and the New York Times was up on her computer screen. Bonding moment! Another time, I answered my phone and it was a call from a liberal election phone tree. I recognized my doctor’s voice and she admitted to thinking she probably didn’t need to give me her spiel. Double bonding! Then she was gone.

This year, for the first time, I chose a Medicare Advantage Plan with the aforementioned difficult local health organization. The lure was partial coverage for dental, acupuncture, and vision, bless their hearts. Now I’m limited to the medical providers who are left on their roster after mine departed. Woe is me.

One of my major concerns is finding a gay-friendly person, preferably female. I’ve always taken my chances, but after the phone tree doctor left, I tried Dr. X. Oh my gosh, what a mistake that was both for me and, I later found out, for all her patients and the staff. It’s not difficult to intimidate me and Dr. X was a master at it. She was medical s&m and there I was, a homosexual beneath contempt—and this in the twenty-first century! I mean, you believe what your doctor says, you trust her, you follow her instructions. But Dr. X was just plain mean. She was expert at identifying vulnerabilities and using verbal ice picks to stab them.

So, I’m cautious now. I’m on tip toes. I’ll travel hours to see someone with whom I’ll be compatible.

My retreating PA had some suggestions, but not one of them is taking new patients in this time of COVID19 and rural staff shortages. I’m grateful she was able to rule out a few pairings she knew would be lethal, to either me or to the doc.

Friends recommended a good woman MD, but she’s employed by the Health District and thus, not covered by my plan. Two other recommendations looked excellent, but are not taking new patients.

Facebook can be helpful once in a while. I posted to a local lgbtq and straight page whose members were generous with suggestions. There was a well-recommended P.A., but the contacts, responding to my search for a female provider, expressed uncertainty that the recommended individual was identifying as female.

Meanwhile, our delightful new lesbian neighbors have also been looking for healthcare, and one actually scheduled an appointment with a woman MD in town, then cancelled when the plague hit, so no input there yet.

Do non-gays have this much trouble finding care? And how do other lesbians approach this headache? Should I simply call the clinics and ask if they employ a professional who is gay friendly, wait for the pregnant pause and assurance that everyone is treated equally, and the inevitable willy-nilly listing of doctors who can squeeze us in?

There’s a neat website, out2enroll.org , which has a search engine for gay-friendly doctors. I plugged in my zip code. The response: “No providers match your search. Try removing some search criteria.” Maybe it works in San Francisco, a ten-hour drive from here in good weather.

And then there’s https://www.outcarehealth.org/outlist/. Same response. HRC has a list, but it only includes hospitals for my state—

Our medical center is not listed. I actually noticed, when I signed up for the Advantage Plan, that sexual orientation is not included in its Equal Employment statement.

What’s a dyke to do? What I’ve always done. Make an appointment with an unknown quantity and hope for an open-minded practitioner who thinks gay patients are as valuable and deserving of respect as heterosexuals. She’s out there, it’s just a matter of enduring a Dr. X or two until I find her.

Copyright Lee Lynch May 2020

The post The Amazon Trail: Is there a doctor … first appeared on Lesbian.com.

“We lost a giant today,” tweeted California State Sen. Scott Weiner, who is chairman of the LGBTQ caucus. A giant is exactly what the ninety-five-year-old Phyllis Lyon was, along with her partner Del Martin, who died at age eighty-seven in 2008.

My friend the sailor broke the news to me. She e-mailed, Del and Phyllis made a difference in my life. Yours too? No finer compliment could be given.

I responded: Oh, this hurts. They certainly made a difference for me. I was able to read their creation, “The Ladder,” from age fifteen on. They were role models as a couple and in their activism. Thanks for breaking it to me.”

Yes, with my hair slicked back by my father’s Vitalis, in the hand me downs from a boy across the court, hoping to someday own a pinky ring, and waiting to reach an age when I could frequent the rough and tumble gay bars downtown, my girlfriend Suzy and I spotted the magazine founded by Phyllis and Del.

It was an unthinkable accomplishment then, the production of a periodical about ourselves. We weren’t even old enough to legally buy it. Suzy, the bolder of us, probably took it to the register anyway. Or maybe some other babydyke swiped it, afraid to take it to a cashier, and passed it on, afraid to take it home to Brooklyn or New Jersey where she lived with her parents.

If Suzy and I were afraid to purchase “The Ladder,” I cannot imagine the enormous courage of Del and Phyllis. They gathered material from closeted lesbians, signed their real names to their own writings, and, braver still, approached a printer. I remember the struggle Tee Corinne and I had twenty-five years later, getting our local copy shop to print our self-published works.

Where had this paper miracle come from? Who was behind it? I was a contributor to “The Ladder” before I knew its history. By 1960, the year I first read it, “The Ladder” was on Volume 5. It was published in San Francisco. How had it been distributed to a magazine store in New York? Of course, we were still children and adults ran the world, even our world. We might question and defy authority, but the magazine was a product of adults and whatever magic they supplied to make things work. I was in awe.

Today, “The Ladder” might look like a dinky little magazine. In 1955, when they first achieved this marvel, it must have represented a logistical obstacle course for Del and Phyllis, whose activism consisted of much more than the printed word. Like so many lesbian projects right up to the present day, the work they and their cohorts produced was all volunteer. They risked loss of their jobs, their birth families, their lovers, their homes, their very sanity, to assert the legitimacy of our condemned lives. There was nothing dinky about that magazine, or the men’s equivalent, “One.” Both periodicals were powder kegs fueling what was to become the gay rights movement, a movement that changed government, schools, religious institutions, the military, and the lives of fearful, confused, often self-hating individuals who found our way to fuller lives and healthier psyches.

Phyllis Lyon made a profound difference in my life. It was due to Phyllis that I survived my otherwise unguided, unmodeled teens. It was due to Phyllis I was able to resist the course of conversion therapy (not called that then) my college unofficially required of me. It was due to Phyllis that an outlet existed for my words. It was due to Phyllis and her union with Del that I saw I could commit to a woman I loved and stay for better or worse. It was due to the tenacity and victories of Phyllis Lyon and our other giants that I lived to embrace who I am because she so publicly embraced who she was.

So yes, my sailor friend, let’s just say she made it possible for me to be a very happy, stable, exultantly married woman and published lesbian writer today. I am one of her accomplishments. I hope she was just as proud of me as I’ve always been of her.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2020

The post The Amazon Trail: A Giant first appeared on Lesbian.com.

My sailor friend e-mailed me last night. She had just gotten home from her women’s group where they discussed the fears engendered by the state of our nation. Only they didn’t use the term state of our nation, they used the word “coup.”

Another friend writes a valuable Word Press blog titled “Nel’s New Day.” Ever since the presidential election of 2016 she’s been, almost daily, gathering information about the person she calls DDT, or, Dictator Donald Trump.

Dictator? Coup? Are they talking about the United States of America?

Coup is a word that goes back to 1572 in its usage as coup d’état, according to Merriam Webster. Their definition of coup is “a brilliant, sudden, and usually highly successful stroke or act.” While the outcome of the 2016 election was not brilliant in the least, it was sudden and is still coming at us like a freight train with failing brakes.

Rachel Maddow, on her TV show, unearthed a brief essay by Masha Gessen from the November 11, 2016 issue of the “New York Review of Books.” Gessen is a Russian American journalist and LGBTQ activist who suggested an alternative concession speech Clinton might have offered ( https://bit.ly/38rR2nl ). Gessen warned us about dangers to watch for once our own “autocrat-elect” took office, based largely on Gessen’s experience of living under the Putin regime.

She wrote, and explained with unsurprising prescience, the following: “Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. Rule #4: Be outraged. Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever.”

In particular, too many people have given Mister Trump, once in office, the benefit of the doubt. Small signs of normality, to our naturally hopeful American hearts, have delayed the comeuppance he needs. Today, for example, the attorney general appointed by Mister Trump, complained about “presidential” tweets interfering with his ability to do his job. Not long afterward, the Republican Senate, under Mitch McConnell, actually voted to limit a president’s war powers regarding Iran.

Didn’t that make a scrap of hope float by like ash in the wind?

Our laws, our constitution, our regulatory departments, our military, our very sense of fairness—have been all too successfully attacked by an administration with the ethics and the blood lust of an invasive Florida python. How can we believe you, A.G. Barr, when you’ve been toady to a totalitarian? How can we trust that the senators who couldn’t find a compelling need to impeach Mister Trump have suddenly seen the danger of this illegally elected tyrant?

I may only have the power of my vote, but at least I’m on our side.

Author Renee Bess first brought the question of Michael Bloomberg’s viability as a presidential candidate to my attention in a Facebook post. An NPR podcast suggested that choosing a billionaire to fight another billionaire would at least be fighting fire with fire.

We have other options. Amy Kobluchar belongs to a Christian church that has not only been LGBTQ friendly since the 1970s, but a true ally. Elizabeth Warren is strong feminist and an upstanding defender of economic equality. Mayor Pete has a fresh mind smart enough to know what he doesn’t know and to appoint advisors, not sycophants, to guide him. I would trust an old white Democratic Socialist to make a dent in turning our country around. If primary voters get behind the seemingly reasonable Tom Steyer, let’s go for it.

I regret losing the talents and skills of candidates of color Andrew Yang, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker. To me, the bottom line of Mister Trump’s election was racism. The so-called browning of America terrifies many citizens. Xenophobia is just another word for it. This nation can’t be a melting pot, an attribute of which we were once proud, without adding a variety of ingredients. I worry more about overpopulation worldwide than accepting immigrants. About corporations that possess the rights of human beings more than blending skin colors.

Point being, we cannot afford to take stands like: no more old white men, Bernie or Bust, gays against Pete, or to protest the selection of candidates by declining to vote at all. That’s cost us our Democracy.

Not only do we have to hold back the tide of FOX-schooled Trumpers and foreign and domestic election rigging, we need to look within our own pro-democracy and progressive ranks, quit the quibbling, and create a unified voting bloc that will say no forever to autocracy and wanna-be dictators.

Let’s undo this coup before our institutions completely crumble at our fussy little feet. If we can. Gessen said in an interview that she read the Mueller Report as a story of “swindlers and hustlers and con men.”

I suspect the sailor, the blogger, Renee Bess, Rachel Maddow, and Masha Gessen might agree that our first priority must be: “Throw the bums out.”

Copyright Lee Lynch 2020

The post The Amazon Trail: Please understand how much danger we are in first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Damned if I know whether or not all the rabble rousing of the last sixty years has done us a lick of good. I thought the issue of our rights was pretty much settled, but on October eighth, 2019, Stanford Law School professor Pamela Karlan argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that gay employees are already protected from job discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights of 1964 federal civil rights law.

Some of the Justices seemed to believe that inclusion of sexual orientation in Title VII would have appeared preposterous to the court in 1964. Yet, Ms. Karlan argued, the Supreme Court has applied twenty-first century standards to a number of prior decisions. Discrimination against a person because of gender, she stated, already covers discrimination against sexual orientation.

A woman who dates another woman and is fired for it, is the object of discrimination by the simple fact of her gender. A man will not be fired for dating a woman. The argument is plainspoken and ironclad. Some of the judges needed it repeated many times in many ways.

I’d been out four years by the time Title VII went into effect. The practice of favoring men over women was so blatantly wrong in my mind, I couldn’t believe a law was necessary. It certainly had nothing to do, in the late 1960s, with queer people keeping our jobs. You just shut up and stayed in your closet at work.

When I became a vocational counselor a few years later, my focus was on getting people employed, anywhere, anyhow. There was no question of finessing hires. Women became sewing machine operators at the clothing manufacturers of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Men delivered the raw materials, carted away the completed garments, and, for maybe ten cents an hour more, maintained the sewing machines. To have questioned the part I played in matching the unemployed to jobs by gender was to let my principles—and the law—come between desperate women, destitute men, and their survival. To invoke, or even be aware of, their newly stated rights, was irrelevant for most minimum wage workers.

Hearing Title VII invoked in defense of gay workers in 2019 was an eye opener. Ms. Karlan offered the Supremes, and Congress, an out. New, excruciatingly drawn out legislation is not needed. If a man is fired because he loves another man, and a woman is not fired because she loves a man, then the original man was fired because he’s a man. Period.

These arguments come up, not because the fired individual is a bad employee, but because the employer has a prejudice, an historical, religious, or personal belief about gay people. In other words, because the employer has the power. Just like the women ruining their eyes and hands sewing, the men destroying their back and knees carting, the fired gay person is a victim of someone who has more power, in these cases, the employer.

The United States was not created to disenfranchise people, although we do a lousy job of respecting the rights of Native Americans and other people of color. When the worker is powerless, the employer can dictate who feeds their families and who doesn’t. Laws have always been bandied about, reinterpreted, applied rightly or wrongly, bent and ignored, depending on who is in power.

And that’s where the activism of the last sixty years does make a lick of sense. We-the-people, must stand against courts which would sustain the imbalance of power and we must stand for the use of law to protect workers from prejudice, to protect veterans who live in the streets with their war nightmares, women battered into submission by employers and partners, queer people whose existence is an offense in the eyes of all-powerful beholders.

I no longer believe we can stop war, erase bigotry, take power and use it for only good. I no longer suit up with a wet bandana headband for tear gas, carry a rolled-up newspaper for protection, stay ever on the lookout for escape routes should the march, the rally, the sit-down, turn dangerous. I know now that the rabble rousing must go on and on, if only to keep the lid on the inhumanity of humanity.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2019

The post The Amazon Trail: Damned if I Know first appeared on Lesbian.com.

I used to encourage LGBTQ (aka Q) people to write by telling them, “We need to make sure they can’t burn all the books.” While the burning and banning of books persists in a limited way, now it’s entirely possible to delete every single book.

In terms of personal preference, I read electronic books. With a couple of swipes, I increase the fonts for easier reading. Despite arthritis, I can hold the heaviest of tomes. Health insurance should cover these miracle devices.

At the same time, with a few swipes and clicks, I can remove these books from their electronic pages. How many more strokes would it take to erase my whole electronic library? All the digital books in a public library? All the libraries in the world?

I started thinking about this threat while reading in “The New Yorker Magazine” (July 16, 2018) about a Chinese company, JD.com, which the article described as “…the third-largest tech company in the world in terms of revenue…” Amazon is first in revenue, followed by Alphabet.

The writer, Jiayang Fan, went on to explore the retail potential of rural China and the economic sense of serving millions of untapped buyers by making goods accessible to isolated regions. Few of these customers have computers, but they do have cell phones and coverage. JD.com developed a sales and delivery empire equivalent to UPS combined with Amazon. They use trucks, uniformed men and drones. Villagers gather to watch the drones deliver red boxes containing their orders (from diapers to live crabs). It’s like going to a Walmart where all the customers know one another.

It occurred to me that the internet is literally taking over the world. Or, I should say, the people who own companies like JD.com, are capable of taking over the commercial world. As we become more dependent on them, more familiar with and trusting of them, we are plummeting into a trap that challenges everything we know, including reality.

The 1966 film comedy, “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” has never been truer.

While our legislators investigate, debate, or downplay Russia’s attack on the 2016 presidential election process (as well as internal abuses like gerrymandering, and denial of voting rights), not much has been done to protect that process. Russian—or any—influencers can once again have a field day invading the internet with their misinformation. If a Chinese retailer can deliver to tiny mountain villages with no paved access, then a foreign entity, savvy domestic terrorists, or our own government, can find methods to disrupt a democracy.

I used to imagine enemies taking over voting booths so that my vote for Elizabeth Warren, for instance, would enter the big computer as a vote for some odious candidate. Or, I thought, what was to stop centralized hacking and altered tallies?

Much more effective, and less verifiable, are schemes that influence our voters to elect a puppet whose backers have nefarious intent. This is real, this has happened and is happening. I fear actual citizen votes will prove meaningless, electronically as burned as banned books.

Where these information bombs were once launched by governments, the tactic has since been monetized. Actual companies employ former government and military intelligence personnel, whether computer experts or field agents. The employers may operate within ethical boundaries or not; the profits may be as high as the customer’s goals are low. Great care is taken to ensure deniability so that if laws are broken, there is no bad guy to charge.

Social engineering is the nice name for one of the game plans you can buy from these companies. Want to trick customers into changing brands? Want to malign a witness at a trial? Want to demonize a political opponent? These services are for sale if you have enough money and want to play dirty.

The highest bidders get access to the highest quality technologies. In a successful commercial project, customers will buy, not the best product, but the best marketed product. Deep pocket capitalists can plant detrimental information using, for example, untraceable avatars, perhaps of fake consumers with fake complaints about a product. When the intelligence company makes such a complaint go viral, the hapless competitor loses business and can’t cry foul in a court of law. There are no laws addressing this sort of manipulation through the internet.

If that strategy is deployed in our 2020 elections, a lot of voters will, once again, be loyal losers who elect a greedy, power-hungry figurehead just wily enough to do as his masters command. This is war, cyber war. The sooner we accept that fact, the sooner we’ll be catapulted toward saving our democracy.

If this cyberwar does result in another fraudulent election, we will be that much further along the path to burning books. The figurehead will have a nuclear button for that too and Q books will be the first to go.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2019

The post The Amazon Trail: Global Warning first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Not really. My greatest wishes would be for world peace, a year of pain-free good health for all my family, friends, and neighbors, and a brand-new president and Senate Majority Leader.

It would, however, be nice if I could figure out how to make my left wireless earbud work consistently. They were free and all, so I know I can’t expect perfection. A little technical expertise on my part would go a long way to making the new year bright, as they say in the songs. Songs I can only listen to with my right ear.

Speaking of technical prowess, I have a hint for those buying grandma or an older friend a special gift this, or any, season. Whatever you do, do NOT give someone you love a cordless water flosser, no matter how excited you are about yours. Of course, if you get excited about items like water flossers, you’ve probably already given tutorials to any friend or relation who’d sit still.

I had lunch the other day with my friend the Handydyke, who is in her mid-eighties. I’m a dozen years younger, but we experience life in many similar ways. We were at a Japanese restaurant avoiding all things sushi, which may be another characteristic of aging Americans: stir-fry yes, raw fish and seaweed, emphatically no. Nor is wasabi, however delicious, compatible with elder guts. It’s so spicy it reminds me how getting high used to feel.

We were well into slurping up our safe bowls of yakisoba when the Handydyke mentioned her acquisition of a cordless water flosser. “Water ends up everywhere!” she said. “It makes a mess of the whole bathroom!”

“Me too!” I agreed. “I can’t control mine. Last night I sprayed the ceiling.”

This is true. The cat’s afraid to be in the room with me. Where are the industrial designers when we need them? The power buttons on these things are impossible to find by feel, and my glasses are so quickly coated with a mix of water and mouthwash I can’t see the controls that were conveniently placed on the side facing away from the user. I don’t want to spew the foamy stuff all over myself, so I avoid swallowing while I fumble for the kill switch, certain I’m going to drown. The Handydyke and I choked on our noodles we laughed so hard at our ineptitude.

But getting back to the earbud, I should mention that the set didn’t come with a manual. I shouted into the void of the internet for help with this. A few kind people responded that their earbuds had come with manuals. I feel kinda bad that I didn’t thank them or congratulate them or ask them if they were the reason Trump is president.

In the great scheme of things, I know my left earbud isn’t essential or important to some people. There are things even I want more. Like, I want our democracy back. I want to spend an enormous chunk of defense funds to halt global warming and make decent paying jobs available to all Americans, young to old. I want guns restricted at least at a slightly higher level than water flossers. I want to possess the loving graciousness to say yes when my sweetheart invites me to accompany her to the Tom Hanks movie “Mr. Rogers.” Without gagging.

But I just listened to my first podcasts and it would be terrific to enjoy them in stereo. Podcasts were scary for me. My first problem was: why podcasts? My second was, if you ever figure out their use, how do you listen to them? There was some sort of electronic trickery involved, obviously, and if I can’t operate a water flosser, what hope was there for me to conquer podcasts?

Then my sweetheart presented me with wireless earbuds. I was relieved she didn’t hold my dislike of Tom Hanks and disinterest in Mr. Rogers against me, but it took quite a while for me to tackle the cute little gadgets. Once I did, though, it was full speed ahead. I now have all sorts of knowledge about the former mob in Providence, Rhode Island. About the theft of a rare water lily from an exhibit in the U.K. Why fruit flies aren’t always fruit flies. How senators are able to cite laws and such as if they actually know them.

I can’t wait to go for a long walk so I can learn how nail polishes are named and whether or not I’m living with a psychopath. Someday, I think I’ll be able to listen to the “Women and Words” podcasts by lesbian writers and readers, but right now, I’m sticking with what Google has on offer because I learned by trial and error how to use it.

In my right ear. And never when I’m gagging while immersed in a fracas with my unruly water flosser.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2019

The post The Amazon Trail: All I Want for the Holidays Is a Left Earbud first appeared on Lesbian.com.