Suze Orman
Coming out as a Gold Star is amazing. I'm about a third of the way through Joan Nestle's Femme-Butch Reader (A Persistent Desire) and thinking more about labels and stereotypes than I ever have before. I think coming out as a "55-year-old virgin" (Thanks Suze Orman!) brings the sexuality back into sexual orientation. With the marriage issue I internalized the nobody-wants-to hear-what-goes-on-in-our-bedrooms issue. It's a matter of privacy and marriage is about partnership and love, and not about sexual positions. But you know, it is, at least a little, about sex. I think lately we're trying to pull the sexuality out of the issue so that we can win marriage and adoption and other battles, but there's a whole war here. Butch-femmes in the 50s it seems to me were fighting the war, and those of us today are fighting little battles, and maybe compromising the war to win marriage and adoption and other rights. What we need first is to be able to kiss and hold hands in public. Without that, where's marriage?