1) It's been years since I read Martin Duberman's Stonewall, and it is time to read it again. If you haven't read it . . . well, you never know what kind of a lesson a book is going to give you. This intersecting biography of six very different people involved either at Stonewall or in the first Pride marches that followed taught me something that I didn't expect: that all forms of social protest are necessary to create social change. There is a passage (page 211) from a meeting of the Mattachine Society chaired by Dick Leitsch (who just died) at which one of his loyalists said "We should be firm, but just as amicable and sweet as - " at which point she was interrupted by Jim Fouratt. "Sweet? Sweet! Bullshit! There's the stereotype homo again . . . soft, weak, sensitive! . . . That's the role society has been forcing these queens to play . . . We have got to radicalize. . . . Be proud of what you are . . . and if it takes riots or even guns to show them what we are, well, that's the only languge that the pigs understand!"
1a) So what was the lesson? That all forms of social protest are necessary to create positive social change. I bookmarked that passage. (In the 500+ books I have in this house, less than 2% have bookmarks in them.) That's how much of an impact that made on me.
1b) I remember being at an event with Martin Duberman sometime in the 1990s - I remember it being in the sone of the small function rooms at the Bay Tower Room of all places - but I can't for the life of me remember what it was for or why I was there.
2) Just this minute got a bizarre text from a strange Y*hoo France email address. What on earth?
3) The time of peonies has passed, and the time of orange lilies has come.