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I speak to you as a Washington lover, a lover of Washingtonians, and a descendant of Washingtonians as someone almost conceived at P Street Beach (Well my parents courted there. After the war, they used to meet there on my mom's lunch hour while she worked as a secretary at US News & World Report). I interrupted my mother's graduation from this very university when she married my Dad while attending school here, got pregnant with me and had to have her graduation delayed until 1949.
And 45 years later I brought my parents back to this campus when they came here to hear me welcome six hundred bisexuals (I wanted to see what bisexuals LOOKED like :-) So they heard me welcome a crowd full of bisexuals to our National Conference Celebrating Bisexuality the same weekend Lavender Languages was born, the same weekend as the 1993 March on Washington - the very first national march ever to include the name of bisexuals in its title!
Even though I live here, or maybe especially because I live here I've been marching on Washington for a long, long time! I remember the wonderful youthful heady feeling of being part of our church congregation as we and other congregations poured out the church doors up and down 16th Street swelling our numbers as we went along marching en masse down the avenue to the White House for a civil rights march during the sixties. I remember my mother bringing me as a teenager to the 1963 March on Washington for Civil Rights, Jobs & Justice, where King dreamed his magificent dream but I never knew then that the man behind the march, Bayard Rustin was a black gay man who dared not speak of his love for other men. And I remember fighting several years after that with our family friend who directed the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, telling him the civil rights community needed to recognize GAY rights as part of civil rights too him scoffing at me, telling me I was being unreasonable, but, many years later, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights did finally welcome NGLTF into its coalition and gay rights are now a priority in the LCCR agenda and I'm proud to have been a small part of making that happen!
In Washington, DC, if you love your own sex you're most likely black female and bisexual demographically so I ask that you think of the many beautiful black bisexual women and lesbians in this town who aren't, or are, here today and listen for their stories too.
I remember Audre Lorde first coming out, with great trepidation, at a black writers' conference on stage at Howard University, I remember Sweet Honey in the Rock standing at the altar of All Souls Church exhorting everyone in the pews, "Every woman who's ever loved a woman, you've got to stand up and call her name, mother, sister, daughter, lover, stand up and call her name!" I remember the DC Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays blossoming into the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays and holding wonderful gatherings for Home Girls and Home Boys at the Georgia Avenue hotel we used to call Harambee House, and the gay coffeehouse Ray Melrose and his white lover Gary Walker used to run on weekends outta their Capital Hill garage,
I was reading this article on "Dupont Circle as the heart of Gay DC" in last week's BLADE and I'm like, where are the women's stories, where are the people of color's stories, where are the transgender and bisexual stories about this town? I'm not so sure "there were no gay bars until 1976," as the article says, but I AM sure there were no white male gay bars or ... well, no, I'm not even sure about that. History, like being gay, is what we make it, what we remember, and what stories we feel're important to tell.
In 1966, when I was editor of my high school newspaper in Silver Spring Maryland, before I ever personally identified as queer, I learned about censorship and homo-hatred in a very personal way. My staff and I published an issue of the student newspaper that was seized by the principal and locked up in his safe because, horror of horrors, we used the word "homosexual" as an adjective in an article one of us wrote on the revival of Batman and Robin movies from the 30's. We said the Batman and Robin movies were so funny they were "camp" and then explained "camp" as a word from the homosexual subculture. I got in a huge fight w/the principal because he said homosexual wasn't a word high school students should know or use. It was one of my early radicalizing experiences that made me wonder, well, hey, what IS a homosexual and why SHOULDN'T I know about them and their lives?! (I didn't know then that I might become one, or that I would become lovers with the woman who'd written the article, or that my friends and lovers would die of AIDS, or that I would become an out bisexual role model and sex educator -- but having a formative experience with censorship and resisting it, surely helped give me courage to TELL my stories, to resist the silencing, to INSIST that the truths of our lives be honored, AND told.
I've always walked between worlds - between the gay and straight worlds, between white people and people of color, between the city and the suburbs, betweeen DC as a small sleepy southern neighborhood town and DC as a global crossroads where the powerful meet and greet, between the people of wealth and the people without decent income or homes, between elders and youth, between religious people and humanists between leather people and vanilla people between hot, strong, gorgeous women and beautiful, delightful men. I've never found my home or family completely in one place. Like mixed-race people, I make my home and family out of the richness out of the blend the weave that pulses in between.
And Dupont Circle IS a special homing beacon anchor of my history and that of many of us who've grown up around DC. I remember bringing a big washtub full of purple PassionFruit jello (don't ask :-) downtown to a gay man's apartment near the Circle, circa 1966, so my high school friends and I could make an alternate senior prom ceremony outta spooning jello and listening to jazz and beatnik poetry together rather than stay out in the boring 'burbs.
And I remember the day the Lesbians Stole the Press from the youth service agency where I worked as a young college graduate and all the ways we at that Runaway House, on 18th St., tried to make our organization safe for queer young people even to the point of negotiating with county social service agencies and state juvenile justice bureaus to allow us to place gay foster youth with GAY foster parents and to allow transgender young people to be themselves - we were one of the first groups ever in the country to do so.
I remember when First Things First, the FIRST women's bookstore, way before Lammas was started by Sue Sojourner, and opened a back-street storefront in Adams-Morgan way before it was gentrified or chi-chi.
I remember going to Lili Vincenz's house out in Virginia for women's teas and I remember hanging out at the Gay Liberation Front house on S Street standing around the piano singing with wonderful young men who became precursors of today's Queer Nation Radical Faeries.
I remember when there was an actual women's center in a house on R Street when Whitman-Walker was a small cramped VDclinic on 18th Street and I lived across the street in a women's house called - Amazon Nation - that was host to great community dance parties. At Amazon Nation we led feminist matriarchy study groups, stayed up late into the night debating the politics inside The Clit Papers, MotherRight, and the heterosexism of monogamy. I remember writing one of the first articles about women loving women in off our backs women's newspaper in 1971. I remember going to a DC women's liberation conference that same year where the Radical Lesbians, the Furies, told all us women to abandon our boy children and leave our men, that being political lesbians and giving all our energy to women was the ONLY way the revolution was ever going to come into being and feeling torn, understanding some of the sense of that, but knowing it was never going to be that simple, either.
Most of all I remember developing my sense of myself as a bisexual and my growing certainty that I had a right to be bisexual and that I had a place as a bisexual in queer DC.
I was there at DC's first Gay Pride Day in 1975 and at many gay pride days after that especially the one two years ago when I was honored as DC's first ever BI grand marshall of the parade and where I rode with my woman lover and my man lover marching along waving Bi Pride signs beside me. Some of you know me in my earlier incarnation as Wonder Woman With A Hard On who first marched as a Bisexual Contingent of One with my Bicycle in the 1986 parade ... and many times since.
I was there at the 1979 march on Washington when my friend A.Billy S. Jones and others led the first black gay delegation to the White House I was there on the Supreme Courtyard steps protesting Bowers vs. Hardwick and there at the Third District Police Station several years later demonstrating, with the Alliance of Multi-Cultural Bisexuals and OUT!, Queer Nation and the Church Ladies, to have the DC sodomy statute overturned, and yes, we won that one!
I was there in 1987 marching in the first ever national bisexual contingent and managing the bi media awareness campaigns in all these efforts.
And I was here in 1993, again, back-stage with my co-editor/co-conspirator Lani Ka'ahumanu as she prepared her speech, the first time ever a bisexual has been allowed to speak at a national queer march and there as she, and I, gently but firmly confronted our allies who refused to include us in their remarks about people who love their own sex.
There is no end to this circle of memories and histories that people tell about DC so I'd just like to end with one last remark to tell you that not of the pain I feel so many years being a bridge between the gay and straight worlds but to say I am nowhere near giving up. I have known amazing love and caring I have known inter-racial understanding I have known good people in all categories and groups and I hold that vision clearly in front of me much stronger than I remember the pain.
I am finishing my doctorate in queer feminist sacred sex - exploring the erotic rituals of people who create new forms of community and family through sexually healing acts. And I'm finding that words like sacred prostitute have been twisted and distorted by translators who couldn't imagine or didn't want us to know that priestesses could be spiritual and physically vibrant both and keep their freedom and power intact.
It's been almost 30 years since I first came out in off our backs, after I first wrote the little piece called "Loving Women: Bringing The Dreams Into Life,"
I still find it terrifying to live my own dreams I'm still scared of speaking my truth to the larger world and I still draw courage from you and from all of us especially the most gender-variant among us the most butch, the most femme, the most unable to "pass."
Thank you for helping me hold the dream of a world where none of us need "pass" or feel unaccepted or unacceptable a world in which we're all embraced. Thank you for being yourselves for having the grace and the courage to remember our histories here in DC and everywhere.