I am so excited and happy to announce that my essay “Shy” will be part of a book published by Putnam Adult with around 50 or so essays from the performance project Listen to Your Mother.

It’s available for preorder now if you wanna (in hardback only, so far — not sure about the ebook situation), and I feel so incredibly honored to represent for my Crippled Mamma Sisters.

If you want to see the video of a slightly different version of the essay, here’s what I performed at Listen to Your Mother Twin Cities a few years ago:

On our cozy porch, sipping port given to me by a dear friend, listening to the crickets while the youngest hunts for tiny toads in the drizzly gloaming and the eldest hunches upstairs over his Magic cards: sorting, categorizing. It is past their bedtime, but summer’s end is too close at hand for us to insist on anything. Bicyclists ride slowly past in the darkening street, tires hissing in the shallow puddles.

Misha sighted down his weapon at the Elopus rising from the channel. As always, he was utterly arrested by the beauty and majesty of it. Water streamed from its tusks; tentacles churned the water beneath it.

But he didn’t have much time.

Regretfully, he pulled the trigger.

Silver shot toward the Elopus, enveloping it. A shrinking sphere hurtled back, its wake smooth.

So. Misha had been right, then.

In moments, Herself stood before him: sea water dripping from her pearls, leathery gray skin transformed to pale wrinkles; enormous dark eyes to small, disapproving blue.

“Agent 9,” she said, shaking the water from her skirt. “What was worthy of interrupting my few precious moments of solitude?”

Misha shrugged. “Your country needs you, ma’am.”

Sighing, the no-longer-underwater Queen and the still-undercover actor turned from the bank and headed toward their duty.

(Wrote this for Erica Hoops’ team participating in GISHWHES, a scavenger hunt for http://www.therandomact.org/. Assignment: 140-word-or-less story involving the actor Misha Collins, the Queen of England, and an Elopus. This was ridiculously fun.)

My friend Rachel has written this amazing, wrenching piece that is beautiful, hard to read, kind, damning, and does not put down the Jewish people. If you are looking for great examples.

While the world seems to be split between supporting the Palestinians and supporting the Israelis, my heart is broken into a million pieces for everyone, because I see the fates of both peoples as entirely bound up with each other. While I watch discussion threads devolve into the most hateful anti-Semitism on one side, and the most hateful anti-Palestinian racism on the other, I wonder what ground is left for me to stand on as a Jew whose only politics are that people stop dying before their time and fulfill their sacred purpose for being on this earth.

Read the whole gorgeous, personal, agonizing post here.

You guys, when you say things like “How is it that any criticism of Israel is labeled as anti-Semitic,” please think about how you like it when men say “How is it that anything I say about women they get angry” or when white people say “why are black people so touchy about everything I say” and think about how that makes these people sound.

I have several Zionist friends who passionately defend Israel’s actions. NONE OF THEM have EVER said that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic online or in conversation with me. I have many many Jewish friends who are unhappy with Israel’s actions talk with me privately about how much it hurts them to see their friends using anti-Semitic language when criticizing Israel.

If you want to criticize Israel and not be accused of being anti-Semitic, don’t say anti-Semitic things when criticizing Israel. It’s really not that hard.

If you want to read more about the language that people are using that is Anti-Semitic to avoid it, here is an excellent piece on this by a woman who is feeling much nicer about you than I am right now:

If you’ve spent any time discussing or reading about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I guarantee you’ve heard some variation of this statement:

OMG, Jews think any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic! 

In the interests of this post, I’m going to assume that the people who express such sentiments are acting in good faith and really don’t mean to cause pain to or problems for Diaspora Jewry.  For those good-faith people, I present some guidelines for staying on the good side of that admittedly murky line, along with the reasoning why the actions I list are problematic.

Read the whole piece here.

It took me a while to read Greg van Eekhout’s California Bones. He is a friend of mine, I was very motivated to read it; it is beautifully written and quite gripping. I found my putting-it-down-picking-it-up behavior rather puzzling. But now that it’s done, I see can why: yes, the book is a wonderful heist/magical mobster/alternate history yarn with excellent characters who stick with you and a compelling world I want to learn more about. (It’s also a wonderful start to a series.) You can read sum-ups of the plot and things over at the far more thorough review at i09.

But it is also about inheritance: emotional inheritance, familial inheritance. It is about family bonds broken and severed, and how a person goes about re-creating them. It is about inheritance that we did not want but that was given with love. It is about how everyone we hurt or love or take in affects who we are in a fundamental way. It was too real. I had to keep looking away. And in the end I wept.

Such a good, deep, strong, kind and frightening book. I am so glad he wrote it.

SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS.

Note: I agree to host this blog post for a friend who is an alumni of Gordon College and who wants to speak out on this issue without outing her old roommate — which would happen if she posted under her own name.

My alma mater has been making a lot of headlines lately, and not for the reasons I’d like. Previously known for being one of the more liberal Christian colleges, highly ranked academically, and encouraging of intellectual inquiry, my college is now making a name for itself in the realm of discrimination and GLBT rights. As an alumni, I’m extremely disappointed in the recent choices the college’s President and Board have made, and I thought I’d talk about my specific experiences with GLBT students at Gordon. Because, yes, they exist.

My freshman year I was assigned a roommate from the south. Her Mom wore slips and talked in a gentle accent. My roommate wore pearls in her senior photo. To a girl raised on the West Coast, whose wardrobe consisted of flannel shirts and baggy jeans (it was the 90’s, don’t judge), they were people from a foreign country. From the beginning, we had issues living together.

Our dorms had been built using government funds, and a stipulation of the funds had been that they government would pay for everything in the room not touching the floor. This meant that the bed, desk, and closet, were all attached to the walls. Literally, the only thing touching the floor were our desk chairs (and if they’d have been able to find a way to suspend those in space, they probably would have done that, too). Even though I’d been raised in a conservative home, I’d taken dance all my life and was comfortable around nudity. So it wasn’t uncommon for me to take a shower, walk into my room, and toss my towel on the bed before putting on my clothes.

This made my roommate very uncomfortable. She took to climbing into the closet to change her clothes. No, really, she got into the closet to get dressed . Then she didn’t like it that I had to walk to ‘her’ side of the room to answer the phone, so she bought a double phone jack and a phone for ‘my’ side. Yes, this was still when people used landlines. At one point, she tried to put masking tape down the center of the room and forbid me from crossing it.

Despite all the signs, I was clueless as to her real motivation. After our freshman year, I moved into a single (kind of done with weird roommates after that), and she moved in with other girls. We tried to stay friends and went out for coffee occasionally, but half the time she’d make excuses and cancel, or act very awkwardly around me.

At the same time, the brother of two other students came out.  I wasn’t friends with these girls, but I was aware of the quote, end-quote, controversy surrounding his being gay.

People would confront them in the cafeteria and ask if they were going to stop speaking to him – after all, their brother was now a sinner. Others would talk in hushed voices when they walked by – how could they still love him?  How could they stand to have him around at Christmas?  Others would offer the fake sympathy at which some Christians excel.  “We’re praying for him, we know that God has a plan, and he’ll change his ways.  Sinners can be redeemed!”  With the earnest pressing of their arm, the offer of an unwanted hug.

I watched from the sidelines but, as much as I wanted to say something supportive to them, I didn’t know what to say.  We hadn’t been friends before, so I didn’t know if it would be welcome to walk up and tell them I supported them, that I thought it was okay for their brother to be gay, that I was sorry everyone else was reacting this way.  So I kept silent.  I’m sorry for that.

After my freshman year, I wanted to transfer out of Gordon.  But they’d given me a lot of scholarship money and grants, and my conservative family came down hard on me when I tried to drop out.  It was easier to just go back, keep my head down, and finish my degree. I was so desperate to get out of there that I graduated in just three years. Talking to many fellow alumni in the past few days who are on the same page with me re: gay rights, I wasn’t the only one.

A few years after I graduated, my roommate called me.  We’d still meet about once a year for coffee to catch up. She knew I’d just gone through a really bad break-up and asked me for advice.  “You know I’ve been seeing that guy named Chris, right?” she said.

“Yeah, did you break-up?”

“We were living together, I kicked him out.  But, um, I have a confession to make.”

“…okay?”

“His name wasn’t Chris, it was Christine.  And she was a girl.”

It may have taken a while, but the pieces finally clicked.  She told me she’d been struggling with her homosexuality while at Gordon, that the hours spent praying and talking in tongues had been asking God to ake away her sinful urges.  When she’d recently told her family that she was in love with a woman, that her roommate was in fact her lover, that gentle Southern woman who’d worn dresses, slips and pearls to drop her daughter off at college had gone ballistic.  Yelling, screaming, sobbing.  Constant phone calls urging repentance from other family members, her pastor, people in the church. Being told she’d been put on the prayer chain, that they were fasting so that she’d repent of her sin.

Constant, constant, constant pressure to not be who she really was.

I can’t imagine going through that, having people you love turn on you, the pressure to just conform with their worldview, stop making them so uncomfortable.  Now that I’m a parent myself, I can’t imagine doing that to my child.  She broke down sobbing on the phone with me, telling me she was going to go to ‘gay therapy’ to be ‘cured.’  I sat in my car, parked next to the Boston Commons, in a city that stands as a beacon of freedom in our country’s history, crying with her.  But not for the same reasons.

I’d been raised with the same dogma, the ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ crap that gets spewed in self-righteous tones as Christians try to tell gay people they don’t hate them, per see, just their lifestyle.  Because who you love, or who you’re attracted to, is a lifestyle choice. At the same time, I’d been surrounded by gay men in the dance world. I loved many of my teachers and had always struggled with the concept of learning from them, respecting them, but hating their sin. It had never seemed right to me. In the years during and after Gordon, I’d done a lot of reading up on the subject and come to firmly believe that the word translated as homosexual in the New Testament was mistranslated.*

And, if it’s one thing I’m sure that the Bible is very clear on, it’s that God is Love.  Not hatred, not bigotry, not telling your kid that who and what they are is anathema to you.  To me, creating someone as gay but then telling them that they should be celibate – the compromise some churches have reached on the subject – is cruel.  Hey, I made you gay, but guess what?  You can’t ever have sex or you’re sinning!  Ha, ha, joke’s on you.

My roommate went to that gay therapy.  She never called me again, and the few times I tried to call her she never called back. She’s married now, with a kid. I hope she’s happy.  God, I hope she’s happy.  But a mutual friend of ours ran into her a while back and her only comment was, “She’s lost a ton of weight, she’s scary skinny.  Like she’s trying to just fade away.”

And isn’t that what the church, what the President and Board of Gordon want? Just fade away, go away, stop making us confront all this uncomfortable stuff in our community. Accept the bone we’ve thrown you – you’re okay as long as you’re celibate.  Accept that we’ll expel or
fire you if you have sex, even though I could sit here all day and enumerate my straight friends who had sex at Gordon, both on and off campus.

STOP MAKING US LOOK AT YOU.

Well, to all my gay friends that I stand beside, keep making them look.  Keep standing tall. Don’t fade away. You exist, you’re valuable.  And, yes, you belong to God, too. Not that you need my validation, or anyone else’s for that matter.

They tore down my freshman year dorm.  No more closets hanging on the wall. It’s time that Gordon truly acknowledged that there is no more need to hide.

*who’s read through a 200 page dissertation on the subject?  This girl!