links for 2010-10-13

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We’re here for you

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  • Post category:GLBT Issues

It’s National Coming Out Day. 23 years ago today, I was on a trip with some friends to DC for the National March on Washington for LGBT Rights, and just about this time of morning, we rode the escalators up from the Metro at Dupont Circle, where there were massive crowds of people gathered – my people. Before that, I knew exactly 7 gay people other than me, three of whom were with me on the trip. It was like Dorothy opening the door to Oz – amazing and cathartic to know that I wasn’t alone; that I had multitudes. It changed my world, and I was no longer afraid. 23 years later, although we’ve made great strides, kids still need that catharsis to make it through, and we need to be those multitudes for them.

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links for 2010-10-11

  • "The chronological series begins in 1936, when a 16-year-old girl from Tilburg in Holland picks up a gun and shoots at the target in a shooting gallery. Every time she hits the target, it triggers the shutter of a camera and a portrait of the girl in firing pose is taken and given as a prize. And so a lifelong love affair with the shooting gallery begins. This series documents almost every year of the woman's life (there is a conspicuous pause from 1939 to 1945) up until present times."
  • From the NYTimes archives – January 21, 1910 – "Miss Alice Paul, the young woman of Moorestown, N.J., who went to England two years and a half ago and became a suffragette leader, arrived home to-night. She was met by her mother and brother, but not a single suffragist put in an appearance." Oh, just wait.
  • The settlement movement was a reformist social movement, beginning in the 1880s and peaking around the 1920s in England and the US, with a goal of getting the rich and poor in society to live more closely together in an interdependent community. Its main object was the establishment of "settlement houses" in poor urban areas, in which volunteer middle-class "settlement workers" would live, hoping to share knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of, their low-income neighbors.
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links for 2010-10-10

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Sylvia Plath in a Nutshell

Sady Doyle’s succinct and painful summary of Sylvia Plath’s relationship with Ted Hughes [Ladies! Stop Being Mad At Ted Hughes!], now that his post-Plath-suicide poem has come to light

You’re talented. You’re really talented. You might even be a genius. And your gentleman, he’s talented too, though not to the degree that you are. But you type his manuscripts. But you go to his lectures, you nurture his stardom, you play the part of his loving support and fan club. But you are responsible for his domestic comfort. Oh, you have your own successes. He even encourages those. But he’s the talent; he’s the big man; he’s the star. And then you get tossed over, for someone who is nowhere near as talented and spectacular as you, because it turns out that the talented, spectacular part of you, the part that you thought made you a couple in the first place (“we kept writing poems to each other,” was how Plath described their courtship, “then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on”) was never enough to keep him interested. Was never essential to him, the way it was to you. Was never a part of the purpose of you — because he doesn’t need talent or spectacular qualities in girls, apparently. Because he prefers his girls to lack those. So you wind up with all the responsibilities — the kids, the house, the cleaning, the cooking — while he goes off to be a genius for some other girl who’s way more suited to play a supporting part in his life story. Who doesn’t have within herself the potential to eclipse him, to be the one that the story is actually about; who’s safer, that way. You wind up writing all your work — your work, your amazing work, your genius — at four in the morning before the kids wake up. Because that’s the only time you can write it. Because that’s what women do.

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These losers are voting

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  • Post category:Politics

And they hope you aren’t. Vote in this years’ election on November 2nd.

For Marion County voters in Indiana, you can vote early – here’s the info:

Clerk’s Office, 200 E. Washington St., W-122
Begins: Monday, October 4
Ends: Monday, November 1 (at noon)
Weekday Hours: Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.,
Weekend Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sat. & Sun.
They have weekend hours, folks, so no excuses.

If you don’t vote, Susan B. Anthony will cry. You don’t want that, do you?

Also, Alice Paul will picket your house, then have a hunger strike.

Frederick Douglass will deliver a fiery speech from your front porch. It will be awesome, but also embarrassing in front of the neighbors.

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