Let’s go to England and get married. It’s legal there, and it isn’t about special privileges, it is about the fact that they recognize same sex partnerships there as real relationships, and not perverse oddities, as we are viewed by some here in the United States.

I am in fact quite in favor of going to the UK because people are smart there, and even nice in the most unexpected ways. I was walking with a friend in Liverpool, and it was hot and strangely steamy, the way the north can be in late summer, and we were complaining loudly about how thirsty we were, and this little girl turned around and offered me her orange soda. I said thank you, but no thank you, and she smiled and walked further on ahead. It was a special kind of niceness that really doesn’t happen every day in America. We are so used to ignoring people who ask for money in the streets, selling newspapers about the homeless or colorful pieces of glazed clay baked into pipes for smoking pot.

Bruce and I were in Houston, after being threatened by a right wing extremist youth group. We staged a protest outside of the club we were playing in.

Seated on the floor, we had lit candles and a sign with our intention of silent protest of the violence and rage we faced by merely expressing ourselves and therefore utilizing free speech. No one gave us a look. They just walked by. I think it was because we were sitting on the floor, and when you are sitting on the floor, people do not give a shit about you. There could be nothing happening above hip level all that interesting to see, but they will keep their eyes above you, because if you sit on the floor, you must be no good. You are not even up to no good. You are down to no good. So there we were, no good in the neighborhood, and watching the line of people walking in to see us, paying $36 at the window and going right into the showroom. They didn’t give us a chance, give peace a chance, but they were paying all that money to see us in half an hour.

This is no Houston related complaint. It is my favorite American city, besides San Francisco and New York. I have a lot of love for Texas, but this particular Americanism, or trait that is Made in the USA, ignoring the uncomfortable, no matter what it is, made our protest more of an enlightening experience more than anything else. When confronted with something which is unseemly, unpretty, inelegant, affected, obnoxious – or real, needy, helpless, worrisome – the proper etiquette here is to merely turn your head. If that is what we are doing with same sex marriage in this country, then it is never going to work. Avoidance is not going to solve the issue. A fetus has more rights than a gay or lesbian American, who is here, is queer, and deserving of equality. We cannot ignore inequality anymore. If England gets it, why can’t we?

Why is everything better there? Chocolates are superb, music is innovative, fashion is really cutting edge, the television is good and who doesn’t love a good costume drama? With same sex marriage finally on the Parliament floor, they are tipping the scales as greatest country in the world right now. “Let’s Make Love in London,” an obscure documentary done on Carnaby Street in the Swinging Sixties, cinema verite Julie Christie shows the British at their best, and it is a good suggestion for gay couples wanting to do just that.

Sometimes, other people say it better than I do, so thanks for making my job easier today…. I love the poem too…

—– Original Message —–
From: “ernest duque”
To:
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 3:47 PM
Subject: that bitchass Dan Abrams

Hey girl,

You are amazing and truly inspiring to me. I know you hear it a lot from us teenaged gays, but you really are my idol and your words have been a source of strength and courage for me. I saw you at ‘gay day’ at Great America in San Jose. Fucking amazing. And I saw you when you came to USC this past summer. Oh I want to apologize for that too, on behalf of these motherfuckas up in here who were rude, not cute.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing is on one hand to tell you what an important and special person you are to me (especially when I was toiling like a bitch at an allboys Catholic school. It was most def NOT queer as folk material, that shit was not even fit for lifetime). Anyway, I saw you with Dan Abrams and when he pulled that “why are you making it political” bullshit, I almost had a fuckin aneurysm I was so angry!!! Sometimes its so stunning how deep this rightwing, puritanical, censoring bullshit runs. We got Schwarzenegger not even having to appear in court for sexual assault, our own governor. And you’re not supposed to “get political” and not recognize the connection between the FCC, Clear Channel and Bush. Weren’t they running ads FOR Bush last election season? It’s ridiculous.

This witch-burning hunt for “indecency” is just the right wing seeing an opportunity to deprive us further of our civil liberties and bleeding it dry. Didn’t they get enough after 9/11 with the Patriot Act bullshit? It all becomes so frustrating and infuriating that sometimes I think I’m losing hope for any sort of change in my lifetime. But that’s not why we fight this fight. Its not why we struggle for our civil liberties, for equality, for a conquering of sexism, homophobia and racism. It’s not for ourselves, it’s for everyone else and all that will follow.

I want to share this with you. I wrote it while I was visiting El Salvador a few summers ago, seeing the injustice that Reagan and Bush inflicted upon those innocent people all for the sake of imperialism. I’ll leave you with this. I just wanted to express my love and my support for you and my undying thanks for being you. Keep fighting the good fight.

visions
of greatness
images
haunting the mind
whispers
of a future
that cannot be seen
of a cool breeze
that has yet to brush our skin

we reached
for the unreachable
we ran
until our body failed
we prayed
to a God who may not be listening

but we have
these dreams
that push us along the way
these hopes
that fill us with power
this faith
that we will rise above
and taste freedom

toiling for justice
bleeding for hope
dying for love
what Fools we may be
breathing truth
in a sea of lies
and so we will drown

yet
love lies before us
all we can do
is take the step forward
justice rests on the horizon
all we can do
is squint at its beauty
stumble forward
and know
someday
they’ll feel the warmth upon their skin
and smile in thanks
to the souls
who beat the path
that lead
to
freedom

with love, Ernie Duque

I like doing those little soundbite pieces for the news, and the one today was particularly interesting. Howard Stern is comparing the content of an Oprah show with his and questioning why he got fined and Oprah didn’t. I read the transcripts and he has a point. They are talking about sexual practices which are odd and out of my own realm of experience, being somewhat of a sex pioneer myself. On paper, the words read the same, but the context is different. Oprah’s is about education, but then again, who is to say Howard Stern isn’t educational as well? I’ve certainly learned some things from Howard I didn’t know before.

This isn’t a fight between Oprah and Howard Stern. Howard Stern is being scapegoated because he is critical of Bush and makes statements that the government will not tolerate. Oprah, also an independent icon of the underdog is an important player in this game, but it isn’t her actions, or her personally, it is what she represents to women and people of color. This is a free speech issue which the media is brilliantly manufacturing in to a culture feud between the camps of these two liberal icons hoping to start democratic infighting which, if successful will divide the vote and public opinion and keep Bush in office.

I was on MSNBC today, saying that this puritanical uproar – this idea that America’s morality is going to hell in a handbasket held by two gay men getting married has Karl Rove’s fingerprints all over it. Our freedoms are being eroded away, little by little, something that no one can disagree with. When I mentioned this, I was told by Dan Abrams (in for Deborah Norville) not to get “political.” I responded “How is this not political???!!” He shut me down and gave the camera a 10 second look as if to say “What a basket case!”- precious time where I could have illuminated further the piracy of the airwaves by the FCC.

If Bush doesn’t control the media, then he doesn’t stand a chance at another term. Abrams promised me the last word but really he had it and therefore, so did Bush. But we’ve only just begun. We will have our country back, no matter how many salads get tossed, rainbow blow jobs are given or fellatio while defecation shock and awe us away from the truth that the President and his administration is corrupt, dishonest and simply the worst in American history.

The rainbow blow job thing is stupid, because not only am I an expert at, well, that, I am also an accomplished makeup artist. There is no lipstick that can withstand that kind of layering. Most colors lack the pigment or are too glossy and with the heat and friction, just blend into each other and do not have enough contrast for a Neopolitan ice cream, let alone a rainbow.

Here is a picture of my mother’s heart. Her heart is small. Its borders reach out much farther than the tiny nation of her body. If you picture Monaco, try to fit all of North America, the whole of Canada including Quebec, into that miniscule, opulent kingdom then you have it about right.

My husband drove my brother and I to see her yesterday. She is up on her feet, quickly, albeit slightly less so than before, padding around her huge, slightly spare home, filled with photographs and massage machines of every caliber – kind of like an elderly version of “TOYS IN BABELAND” and odd lumbar pillows, the hopefully, twistful and physically fortifying detritus of the aged.

My parents adore my husband, for it gives them a deep feeling of relief, an interior solidity and gratitude that they have not completely failed me in my upbringing. Since they cannot attribute any of my financial and artistic achievements to themselves – wrongfully so, for I would not be this insane had it not been for the chaotic universe that once was my childhood, they look to him as a gentle savior, which he is, but not in the ways they believe him to be. I don’t care, they love him, and that is what matters. When my father will tell a man who is white, who is not Korean, who is not a lawyer or a doctor or plays golf, that he loves him, that he has been blessed with another son, that he must be addressed as “Daddy”- or else temper tantrums will erupt unexpectedly, it’s worth it, at least to me. It is my parent’s failure that has brought me the artistic grace and humility that would make my own impossible, so I guess I have to thank them.

I found a scribbled note, stuffed in my mother’s purse, no doubt when she dashed, by herself, to the hospital. She was writing to my father, in frightened and almost unintelligible script, a treasure map to all the jewelry in the house, to give to me, and only me. She doesn’t keep it in some pretty box, hiding it instead as if there’sstill a war on, which ironically, there is.

The jewelry is hidden in the oddest of places, which I will not disclose, but I also have picked up this odd habit, except I used to hide drugs. My hidden places now will be filled with her precious jewels. They are the most important things in the world, to her, and to me, for they are not valuable – not really, the money spent on them is not the point of why they are so protected. My aunt’s ring and necklace, made of emeralds and diamonds, broken off the crown of a deposed princess, made just for my Mommy, the true Queen, a gift of thanks – unbelievable gratitude to my mother, when she was the only one in the family who could take care of my aunt’s father as he lay dying. The rest of the family were consumed with grief, too paralyzed to carry their paralyzed father to his bed, too teary eyed to drive to the hospital day after day, too shattered to secure burial plots and comfort him through the terribly painful eclipse, as the soul slowly starts to pass through and leave the body, as even though my mother was not his biological daughter, she was his son’s wife, but was the only one to step up to also be the midwife in his death.

These are mine now. I am fucking wearing them and don’t think for one second I am not gonna – all at the same time – that’s right beeee- eaaaacccchhh!!! I am wearing my aunt’s pearl necklace, my Kun Immo, who died far above the world, halfway between the hospital and her home, on a plane above Seattle. Before she died, she promised my mother this pearl, and during the process of dividing all her beautiful things, as my aunt was not only a beautiful creature herself, she surrounded herself with beauty, big ass beauty, it was somehow lost. But the pearl, my mother knew, was the most important, and it was hers. She would not leave without it. She upturned every couch pillow, picked through every pocket, emptied every purse, turned the motherfucker of that house inside out – everything – until she found it – hidden in a tiny zippered pouch in an old handbag.

This necklace is mine too. It falls directly over my heart, and this heart is now a fortress of jewels, over a century of the history of the women of my family, their love expressed through their rings and necklaces, pendants and earrings. Things they were not able to buy themselves, but were given by their husbands, and therefore, were all they had to give, but it meant everything. Because of this, they are powerful, yes, a bracelet can move a mountain. I will show you sometime.

My mother gave me all of it, huge bags and bags, because she doesn’t want to keep it anymore, hidden away, like our history, our stories left untold, for these jewels and these stories are my inheritance. They cannot be appraised. If I brought them to “Antiques Roadshow,” they would throw them back in my face. Some of it is plastic, fakes, some shit from QVC, and then souvenirs from seaside honeymoons at the turn of the century, happy eras, terrible ones, now, then. But its value surpasses all the money in the world. It isn’t bling. It is love, this long, long love that these sisters had for each other, with hands that would reach across the sea, even though they were separated by continents and hardship, war, immigration and isolation, war, racism and hatred in the new land, war, loneliness and death, war, madness and suicide, war, cancer, AIDS and Alzheimer’s, war, a little peace, and then the bad marriages of the 70s. And now another war.

I am now the keeper of the ring. And the brooch, and the bangles. Don’t fuck with me.