‘§VAl\/lAZONTRAlL BY LEE LYNCH lTHE PIANIST AND THE HANDYDYl(E COOKED lwhile th e Butch Nurse, visiting for the weekend, land I hung out and got in the way. Things were ‘ etter than they used to be, the three of them isted, while I stuck to my position that improvements had done nothing to change the essentiafly vulnerable condition of gay people. ", The Handydyke went to set the table, but kept bopping back in to add to her list of things we {could do now: hold hands in public, be ‘th our part- -: ers in the hos- ?pital, buy prop- erty together, keep jobs, make love legally, live together without being hassled, adopt kids, get non—discrimina— tion laws passed — watch The Ellen Show! Oppression has never been a prob- lem for the Butch Nurse. A seminal moment occurred for her while vaca- tioning in Hawaii. A non-gay couple was walking in front of them, holding hands. She took the hand of her partner, the Femme Nurse, and resolved al- ways to live openly. Since then, “We just live our lives,” she explained, “worrying like everyone else about whether we can pay the mortgage.” It was a photograph of the Butch Nurse and '.he Femme Nurse that had started the discussion weeks before. They posed together in identical sparkly vests the Femme Nurse had sewn for Lhem. Their small church was having a dance and ;his was how they’d dressed up for it. They -are ;he only gay couple in a congregation that not Jnly accepts them, but whose minister, unbidden Jy the couple, has offered to marry them should Lhey ever want to take that step. “That would never have happened thirty years igo," declared the Pianist. She told us about a ioung woman and man who double-dated at their )rom with a lesbian couple. The Handydyke popped back in to recall a tale )f a teacher who announced to her principal that ;he was a lesbian, in effect daring the principal to ire her. She kept herjob — the principal, it turned nut, was a lesbian too. ._ Both couples swapped stories about lesbian Jolicewomen, how one lives a severely closeted ife with her partner, never going anywhere be- muse she’s afraid of losing her job. The Ha.ndy- iyke, on the other hand, talked about a totally )ut lesbian cop who has an active community life with her partner. Could it be our perceptions that drive some of Is into the closet while others see no reason to lHaVe Things Gotten Better‘? hide, asked the Butch Nurse. “Do gay people hear about something like Matthew Shepard’s killing and get too scared to be themselves in public?” “By the time we left where we used to live,” the Butch Nurse went on, “the parents in our cul de sac were telling their kids they wanted them to be just like us when they grew up, because -r V y we were the most as: normal people zdaagnaig M there, even though ITY or warm ;*;:..°.::: many 30,“, » A next-door-neigh- 3% mg’?-‘°“°”‘“V*9&om§iw bors are Mormon. The wife is having her eighth child. ¥-’£§?.$.:‘.§‘ ‘ friends in the neigh- borhood." The Pianist re- membered how she and the Handydyke lived before they re- tired from teaching high school in a large western city. “We "She took the hand of her partner, the Femme Nurse, and resolved always to live openly." were scared all the time. We wo11ldn’t even have a lesbian book in our home.” When they moved to the Northwest they opened a bookstore and sold both children’s and lesbian books. They have a friend who now leads a gay kids group in a high school. ’ “We’re not a threat to straights when we live normal lives," insisted the Butch Nurse. “They didn’t even have a word for us 150 years ago," declared the Pianist as final proof of prog- ress. I think of the February murders of two gay men at a New Bedford, Massachusetts bar. That same month, despite the fact that sexual orienta- tion is a protected status in South Africa and last year same-gender couples won the right to marry there, 19-year old lesbian Zoliswa Nkonyana was at- tacked by a group of men and killed in Cape Flats township. And I think, with all the outward signs of progress, the universal fear and aversion to gay people runs so deep that as long as one gay man in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is a crime pun- ishable by death, or one old gay woman shunned by the staff at in a nursing home in the U.S., is vulner- able, not much has changed at all. Y 3 Copyright Lee Lynch 2004. Lee Lynch lives in Newport, Oregon. ‘ APRIL 2006 l‘ nut in the mnuntulns I3 THERAPEUTIC MASSAGE WILLIAM COIL , NATIONALLY CERTIFIED MASSAGE THERAPIST “ Deep Muscle Therapy 0 Sports Massage Chronic Pain Management 0 Stress Management : Practice limited to male clientele. 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