Financial Planning is important for anyone. For gay and lesbian partners it can be crucial. - For same sex partnerships, proper financial planning can help ensure that you and your loved onesare properly protected. As a Financial Consultant, my goal is to meet your needs in a relationship based on trust and professionalism, working closely with your attorney or CPA to develop a strategy based on your unique situation and objectives. Call me for a free consultation. Mitchell Rosengarten Financial Consultant (802) 775-4371 or (800) 628-2132 90 Merchants Row Rutland, VT 05701 THIS IS WHO WE ARE. THIS IS HOW ‘WE EARN lT." B£:fiE.Ya- Smith Barney does not offer lax or legal advice. Please consultyour taxllegal advisor for such guidance. @2004 Citigroup Global Markets Inc. Member SIPC. Smith Barney is a division and service mark of Citigroup Global Markets Inc and its affiliates and is used and registered throughout the world. ClTlGROUP and the UmbrellaDevice are trademarks and service marks of Cltieorp or its affiliates and are used and registered throughout the world. THIS IS WHO WE ARE. THIS IS HOW-WE EARN IT is a sewri-:e mark of Cifigroup Global Markets Inc. Shouldn ’t yqyr (next vacation la. a Bike in framze, hike ‘in the Alps -- or choose from over 20 other exciting, outdoor '5/actions. Samson , ur.r‘z6_ :23; an arm 5-9 PM WATERFRONT PARK Burzmvcrou Ammssr MP 5 Samar} 5100 - VIP gr 553m) 550 - 520 Gmemz Aawssrom {$17 sews: my 1) .55 flffilfif-IA rm DRMRS ‘ Clrimnrlv 5 & (Juan? I‘/err I Gaylias y is it that everyone who rents Alias is gay?” my friend Dave asked-me the other day as yet another queer couple left the video store where I work holding their next fix of the addictive show. I’d been watching Alias for a while, and had turned my roommates and friends on to it as well, but hadn’t considered the possibility of any queer following, only thinkingthat most of my friends loved it — not because they were queer. but because of the intensity of its cliffhanger structure and the undeniable beauty of its heroine, Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner). But Dave was right; at least among the clientele of (the now “Off the") Waterfront Video, the Alias devotees were a decided- ly queer bunch. Even if I take into consideration my decided tendency , to turn a sample of three people I know into a “trend,” a brief Internet search confirmed my sus- picion — there was a brief article on the queer following of Alias in gay.com as early as the first sea- son. , Perhaps part of the rea- son for my delay in noticing this pattern is that there’s surprisingly little overt queer content in Alias. Unlike other perennial queer favorites like Bufify, The L Word or Queer as Folk, there are no explic- itly queer characters on Alias, or even overtly queer themes. Why, then, does the show resonate so deeply with queer viewers? I think this is for a series of reasons, not the least of which is the way the show foregrounds identity as performance, combined with its focus on familial trauma and the tension between the hero- ine’s connections to her family of origin and her family of choice. I think it’s safe to say that the fear (or reality) of familial rejection is a source of the central trauma of many queer people’s lives. As a result, queer people often build up a family of choice, made up of people with whom it’s easier to envision an alternate value system. The appeal of Alias lies in the combination of this familial insta- bility with an acknowledgement of the constructed nature of identity, experienced by queer viewers not only in the experience of drag, but in the act of closeting oneself, undergone by almost all queer peo- ple at some point. Okay but before I even start with any of that, here’s a brief synopsis of the convoluted plot. Sorry if it sounds over-the-top, but that’s part of the show‘s.appeal. Sydney begins the show working for SD—6, which she thinks is a black-ops branch of the CIA. After ' her fiance’ is murdered by SD—6, she discovers that they are in fact a terrorist organization and begins working as a double agent for the real CIA. She finds out that her father, from whom she has been estranged for most of her life, is a double agent as well. Then (still with me?) she discovers that her mother, whom she long believed was dead, is in fact alive and working with a rival terrorist fac- hood, without their knowledge or consent, to participate in hetero- sexuality, the parallels between Sydney’s relationship with SD’-6 and that of a queer kid with her family of origin become striking. Perhaps because of this instability in her family of origin, and her inability to rely on her par- ents for unconditional support, Sydney’s family of choice is clear- ly the source of her emotional sus- tenance. This is why it’s so heart- breaking when her connections with her family of choice are con- stantly jeopardized by the machi- nations of her family of origin. Her fiancé is murdered under Sloane's direction, with the approval of her father, after she tells him she’s a - spy, and her best friend is mur- dered by an agent from a rival fac- tion (possibly connected with her mother) and replaced by a double. Not to say that I think that the straight families of queer kids are necessarily destructive forces — but I think the power of Alias lies in the way it shows the ' connection between the family of -The power of Alias lies in the way it shows the connection between the family of origin and the destructive system of heterosexuality. tion. It goes on and on like this — every twist is more extreme than the last. As part of this convolu- tion, few of the relationships in the series remain steady, especially those between Sydney and her family. In the first two seasons, Sydney’s family of origin is repre- sented by SD-6: her father works there, her boss, Arvin Sloane, is clearly the patriarch of that space, and there’s even some confusion about whether or not he might in fact be her biological father. Sydney discovers halfway through the first season that she was part of a CIA operation that trained chil- dren to be agents from childhood. Without her knowledge or consent, Sydney was trained from child- hood toward a specific way of being in the world — to participate in a specific system. When we consider this in comparison to the way kids are trained from child- origin and the destructive system of heterosexuality. Sydney’s con- nection with her parents is deep and lends the show much of its emotional power, and I don’t think ' that connection is wholly negative. The problem — and thus the the- matic connection to the problem of so many queer people — lies in the way that this family compels Sydney to participate in a system that is ultimately. destructive to her. It wouldn’t seem explicitly queer in that — after all, unwanted parental pressure is the subject of loads of literature that doesn’t have a queer subtext. It’s Sydney's weekly drag act as she negotiates the minefield of familial relation- ships thal resonates most deeply with this queer viewer, at least. Hopefully that's indicative of some kind of trend. 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