Here’s a little learning to get you started!

Where does bingo come from?!

Like everything awesome and folky, there are a couple of different stories out there.

The main thread has it that bingo has its origins in an Italian lotto game in which you select numbers in different patterns to win. It spread across Europe, ultimately taking shape as a game in which a caller called numbers on a card and people used a bean to cover them on their card – winners yelled “beano!” when they filled a line. At some point, bingo got to America and started being played at carnivals. Edwin Lowe, a travelling toy salesman, ran across it at a carnival and brought it up to New York, where a stuttering contestant changed “beano” to “bingo” by mistake.

Or maybe it is that Edwin Lowe brought it over from Germany, where he was travelling. At any rate, everyone agrees that it happened in or around 1929.

But there’s also the story of Hugh J. Ward, a Pittsburgh native son who came up with the game around 1924 (note this is mostly mentioned on lists of Pittsburgh accomplishments.) He took it around to travelling carnivals, evidently held a copyright (if only copyright research prior to 1978 didn’t require being in DC or paying!) and published a book on the rules in 1933. Maybe. Wikipedia supports this point of view, but citation-free = who knows.

At any rate, bingo made Lowe’s business. He made his fortune selling bingo and it took off around the US and then the rest of the world.

How does it work?

I will be calling numbers. When I call a number you have, you punch out the little number on your card. When you have the right pattern punched out, you yell — well, hopefully you know this part.

The fun comes in trying to make different patterns. Sure, everyone knows the five-in-a-row, but with bingo the sky’s the limit. Some of the patterns we will be playing:

Eff that, dude, I want some music videos.

Okay.

When I came out, in the late 1990s, the internet was just starting to enter the mainstream. Nerds had been running around IRC – that’s internet relay chat – and Usenet – the first message board. The internet didn’t have pictures, at least not very easily, but people are people and people like porn and where there’s a will, there’s a way. (NSFW if your W doesn’t like ASCII pictures of breasts!)

Any chat room dedicated to teens was essentially everything the religious right made it out to be. We briefly mentioned other things – bands, or maybe how much we hated school – but ultimately they were about one thing: S-E-X. If you entered a room with a feminine-sounding name, or if you answered the obligatory a/s/l (age, sex, location) with anything f, you would have your pick of teenage boys who wanted to internet bang “ur hot pussy.” I still remember feeling like that, down there, on a BBS chat room in 1995 with some boy whose name I only knew as “dirtysock.” It was the first time I ever remember being aroused.

But it wasn’t until I came out as a lez that I really discovered what it was to have sex on the internet. Teenage lesbians on the internet were craaaazy – they wanted to do it constantly. Internet fingerbanging! Internet simultaneous oral sex! Internet fisting! In a world where bodies were infinitely adaptable and sex was constrained only by desire, everyone could do everything all the time. All of us teenage lez got to try on these new identities, play with ourselves and each other, and even get off, or at least get hot, in real life.

But what’s funny, of course – what you’re thinking right now – is that they probably weren’t lez teens. No! They were probably men, gross old men, gross old lech men trying to woo us unsuspecting real teenage lez into having sex with them. They were posing! Masquerading! Conning us!

Bullshit they were. Obviously, they might not all have been who they said they were. I wasn’t either – I didn’t live where I said I lived or look the way I wanted to look. They weren’t coming near me in real life, I wasn’t coming near them in real life. We all got off, and we all got to experiment, and did it even matter who was behind the keyboard? Really? I mean, really?

It feels sacrilegious to talk about teenagers having sex on the internet, let alone with pervy old men, as if it is no big deal. But guess what: it was no big deal. No harm was done to me aside from perhaps some wear on my carpal tunnels.  Most of the teenagers who get abducted are not being tricked; they know they are meeting an adult and they consent to the meetings (PDF; study from the APA.) We can argue about how much consent is really possible, but that story of the tricked teenager is mostly myth. We can assume that most of the teenagers on the internet are safely banging away, and yes, they’re looking at porn and yes, they’re probably sexy texting and no, this does not make the internet a bad thing.

There has been so much tension on the internet this past year about whether or not people should be who they are in real life all the time. This was the first year of the nymwars – the wars between people (who control major internet services) who insist on fidelity to your real life experience vs. the people (who use major internet services) who understand that even in real life, there IS no one real life experience.

It’s hard to imagine my teenage lesbian internet sex fiend years without the nymwars, obviously. But this is really just the first inkling of a larger tension: how free is the internet, really? Who will control it, and how?

There is a lot of talk right now, via SOPA and PIPA, about the possibility for broad-based internet censorship in the United States. These two bills would allow for incredibly broad censorship via levelling claims of copyright violations against websites. Don’t like something? Take it down. It frightens you? Take it down. Even the US senators supporting the bill are violating its terms. This isn’t going to be fairly applied. It’s an internet version of stop-and-frisk laws: an easy way to get people in trouble who you want to get in trouble anyways.

​ The stuff I was doing on the internet is the kind of thing that makes people uncomfortable about the internet. It is also the kind of thing that almost everyone does at some point (don’t even tell me you haven’t ever looked at porn online.) It is ALSO also the kind of thing that a lot of people would love to shut down, but they can’t – at least not easily. SOPA and PIPA provide those kinds of rules – easy, without due process or any kind of accountability. Copyright claim and poof! That’s it.

I would argue, actually, that all that exploration was good for me. It taught me how to think about sex and how to describe it. It taught me what made me hot. It taught me to have fun, to perform about it, and even how to say no or disengage when something wasn’t fun. I want to say “sometimes a little misbehaving isn’t so bad” but the thing is, I wasn’t misbehaving – I was just doing something that makes a lot of people a little uncomfortable that didn’t hurt anyone. Here is to an internet free enough for all of us to have that opportunity.

(ps xo to Eliza Ridgeway for the assistance!)

I am a professional well woman exam getter. I help med students learn to give gyn exams as a patient instructor. I did it in college and I’m getting back to it now. I have received approximately 15 speculum exams since September. I have a really reassuring voice when faced with a speculum and I can tell you exactly where my cervix is.

People are really surprised when I tell them this. I think they expect that, because I look like a man, I am supposed to be profoundly uncomfortable with the existence of my vagina. I feel weird sometimes about my vagina professionally for a ton of reasons that can be boiled down to “I grew up a woman in America.” I am a weirdo even in this work – hairy, fat, and I look like a man with my clothes on. I try to push past that out of a sense of righteous nobility – that no matter how fat, or hairy, or unexpected, practitioners are obliged to treat every patient with respect, and there are a lot of people that look like me who have a vagina and who deserve good care.

Given my funny job, I am something of a connoisseur in the vagina exam department. When I go for my annual exam, I am paying attention to the skill of the provider. Steady touch? Good with a speculum? Reassuring? Empowering? We take students through a script that is incredibly demanding in its level of detail and its ritualized patient interaction moments, but it is all to help future providers approach their patients with grace, dignity, and in a way that empowers and involves the patient. This knowledge – the gold standard in vagina exams – is knowledge that I wish everyone had because everyone should know the kind of care that they deserve.

I have never – never — had an exam that is nearly as empowering as the exam I teach students to give. I had my annual exam yesterday – make that 16 specula – and it was a textbook example of what not to do. She walked in on me while I was still changing! Suddenly there her finger was in my vagina! She would not have passed the exam I grade.

If I was not a professional vagina haver, I would have been freaked out, embarassed, and unsure what was happening. I was still these things, although as much out of a sense of professional rage as personal discomfort. I like to think she was like this because there was a note in my file saying “this person is chill and comes in annually” so she figured I didn’t need much care. But I have no proof of that. All she had to do was say “do you mind if we work quickly” and it wouldn’t have been so bad. Instead there I was, on the table, trying to decide how much of a fight I wanted to pick.

We have to learn to fight with doctors when we need to. We have to get over the idea that healthcare should be disempowering or that we ought to feel alienated and out of sorts Kelli Dunham and Jessica Halem talk about this as just one resource – there are tons more – but I just want to say it. I am a professional and I still felt bad fighting back, knowing I was getting treated poorly. The doctor/patient relationship is intense and power-laden and we have to find ways to force our own empowerment and understanding.

I am mad about the exam I got yesterday for everyone who has to push themselves to go to the gyn at all. I am mad that I wasn’t paid more consideration or engaged in the exam. I am mad for everyone who doesn’t know they deserve better, who expects it to hurt, who is embarassed and afraid and who has no idea why there is a finger in there or why the doctor didn’t ask before putting it in.

Anyone who knows me knows I am a vain person. I am a horribly vain person, and more than that, I am vain in a Capricorn way – which is to say, I obsess over fashion rules and then feel guilty I am not doing it right. Light shoes after Labor Day? Oh god! No! Brown shoes black bag? I’d rather die. God forbid I wear a bow tie out of proportion to my shirt collar. I know these rules are completely made up and yet I cannot help myself. I am forgiving (well, mostly) forgiving of other people’s lapses but I? Must remain above the fray. God forbid I should end up in public undone.

So I did what any reasonable person would do before going to a giant anti-capitalism protest: I stopped in at the department store to get a little something to wear.

I spent probably 45 minutes there in the men’s furnishings department, worrying about which socks were most appropriate given the color of my pants. Is there any finer illustration of the contradictions of our times?

I talk a lot about fashion as a weapon and a way to navigate all the complexities of how we walk through the world.  I feel nervous about being judged – for being a fat person, for having an ambiguous gender (well, ambiguous to other people). Fashion is my way to try to control how people see me. I think at best I go for a “well, that one’s clearly making choices” response. I look good, and I know it, and I know that the way I look good probably doesn’t resonate for a lot of people, but at least they cannot pretend I’m being unintentional.

But blah blah motherfucking blah, fashion is revolutionary, my gender is precious and excuses my consumption, that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is what it means to really, actually, in the moment fail to live up to your own ideals.

Why did I feel a need to go buy a motherfucking bow tie? What would really have happened if I showed up all wrinkled? Wasn’t my presence at the radical protest synagogue more important than whether my socks were too dark for my pants?

I bought that bow tie because I thought it would make me feel better. And it *did* make me feel better. But that’s because I’ve been trained to feel good about myself when I fit certain tropes of capitalism, like looking done a certain way and having nicely maintained things. By looking a certain kind of good, I am exerting a certain kind of control: sure, I might be a fat gender weirdo, but at least I am participating fully in the capitalist tropes of spending money to look appropriate! See! I’m not so bad!

Again, I believe in people doing the work to be themselves for whatever that means for them. And I also really want to honor the ways in which people around the world get killed — actually — for their fashion choices, especially when they’re rolled up with non-normative gender. But for me, here, in NYC, those aren’t the stakes for me, and I need to be more critical of the ways in which I let myself off the hook in the name of my own revolution.

Sometimes, I’m a capitalist, and always, it’s better to own our flaws than pretend it isn’t the case.

And the bow tie? It was too short anyways.

I was there to, of all things, see a movie. I somehow ended up on a listserv for a whole world of observant Jewish women’s arts. Women are forbidden from performing? singing? in front of men. My impression is that this has historically meant that women just don’t get to do much of that, or maybe that’s just my outsider bias. But I saw an ad for this movie, The Heart that Sings,  and I watched the trailer and I was won over. A musical! About frum girls! How could I not?

The movie itself is a touching and movie-musical-worthy story about a young Jewish woman (Miriam), a Holocaust survivor, who ends up the music and drama teacher at a summer camp for rich and pampered Jewish girls. Will she pull off the annual camp show? (Yes.) Will she finally resolve her past? (Yes.) Will the other counselors grow to like her? (Yes.) You know. It’s all wrapped up in frumkeit – long skirts, Yiddishy language, watching Miriam wash before eating, music praising and praising Hashem but also encouraging the girls that whatever their dreams are, they can do it if they pray. The story itself unfolds differently than the standard “nerdy teacher who wins in the end”; the girls end up liking and trusting her because they feel bad they have been so mean after all she has been through, rather than because she finally wins them over in a montage. She wins over the camp at large only after she is the beneficiary of a real miracle. There are dance numbers, and a hundred songs, and a couple of Holocaust flashbacks.  The film itself was beautifully shot with all of the lighting and period-accurate props you could hope for.

The movie is the work of this fierce woman, Robin Saex Garbose, who – as she put it yesterday, after the screening – saw a niche market and realized it needed to grow. She has a serious theater background in the secular world, although clearly has become more observant. She was teaching classes for frum girls, realized they needed a place to perform and build as artists, and so she made that space vis a vis two feature length films. Two feature length films!

I kept thinking, though, how good this is. How awesome it is to see women making their own art, for each other, and taking each other forward. This movie passed the Bechdel test higher than almost any movie I have seen – not just because there were no men, but because women actually talked about themselves and each other caringly and all got to be real characters. It was no Fiddler situation where the women are only characters inasmuch as they get married or have opinions about marriage. These were observant women, acting religiously, having adventures and singing about being strong and taking risks and so on and so forth.

The Q&A was super interesting inasmuch as 1) clearly the women and girls present were REALLY GLAD that this movie existed, leading me to believe there is not yet much content out there; 2) the concern that showing frum girls bullying each other might somehow reflect badly on the frum community, as if somehow those of us out here in secularlandia really expect that these things don’t happen everywhere. The filmmaker also, in passing, talked about the difficulty of finding conflicts that still reflected the morals she wanted to espouse, saying that (for example) she would never be able to do a film of a girl going off the derech (ie, becoming less traditionally observant.) It’s a huge bummer – I can only imagine how that could be a really interesting and thoughtful film, even if it ended up with her coming back into the fold.

This is the part where of course, it’s easy to roll your eyes – oh lord, those fundamentalists and their propoganda. But really, look at any other teen movie – the tropes are just as strong, the plots just as predictable. Of course nothing revolutionary is going to happen. Teen movies are about reinforcing the prevailing morality, not analyzing or deconstructing it.

I liked The Heart that Sings. I liked that it passed the Bechdel test so well. I like that it gave girls a chance to think about what they could do. I liked that it was a film about girls learning and growing and not a film about girls worrying about dating boys. And I like the idea of women doing it for themselves – I hope that this goes even further, that more girls and women make movies, that we get to hear more voices and more stories and the nuance that goes along with it. Because that? Is feminist. And I? Am not nearly enough a part of that community to be passing judgement.

Manarchists and unchecked white privilege and unchecked class privilege and ideologues and grandstanding and the need for ideological perfection and lack of forgiveness and hidden trust fund babies and white person dreadlocks and lack of ferocity and willingness to infight and a hundred other things make it so easy to pour a tall glass of haterade and drink, drink, drink.

I don’t go to actions that don’t have at least one woman as a featured speaker. I don’t go to protests that aren’t backed by people of color-centered organizations that I trust. I don’t go to protests that I think are foolhardy, or pointless, or about marching around to prove we can march around. I hate protests, period, really – it’s not like they change anything, they just are a good reason for us to feel good, and whatever, half the people there need to shower anyways.

And I HATE a manarchist. I hate them deeply. I hate the whole culture of white man manarchy where you show up SUPER RADIKKKAL and take up all the space and don’t think critically about how you are being oppressive in the name of “being an activist.” I hate name dropping manarchists and maoist manarchists and bearded manarchists and especially the ones with the white man dreadlocks. ESPECIALLY THOSE. They are everywhere, in every movement that isn’t explicitly queer or people of color-centered and sometimes, even then, the manarchists roll out and make stupid choices that end up screwing people over.

I have no idea why Occupy Wall Street has not succumbed completely to the manarchists. I saw them there, this morning, when we were there to hold the park in case of police attempt to shut it down. I heard them – I think I heard them, it’s hard to tell on the human mic – orating broadly about the way we will rise up together. You can always tell a manarchist. They like to orate broadly about the way we will rise up together.

But somehow OWS hasn’t fallen into that rabbit hole. The plan for civil disobedience in the face of the park considered all of these things like people who can’t get arrested and varying levels of willingness to risk – because the direct action committee, according to my friend, is largely made up of women of color. The kitchen staff isn’t just women, although there are a lot of women there. Somehow things have not dissolved into partisan tantrums, or hopeless fracturing. The manarchists are there, smelling up the joint and running their mouths and trying to take people on ill-advised “civil disobedience missions” that are mostly excuses to look macho. But that force of ew has been resisted by a much larger and smarter force that seems to be thinking critically about how much danger that kind of manarchy can have to the larger cause.

My other friend was telling me that the whole thing got started by a bunch of white man college students. This could not be a larger red flag – except that no one knows who these white man college students are. Rather than stay up there and manarchist about, they pulled back and started creating structures for many people – any people – to take the mic. That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s enough to make this hardened cynic start thinking about how maybe I should not just bitterly sign another internet petition and, instead, take it back to the streets.

I love this protest. I love this occupation of Wall Street. I love this nascent growing community. I love it in a way that is almost irrational; somehow this is cutting past my usual skepticism. There are so many white dreadlocks there! The demands are so poorly defined! And yet I love it.

I love it because of how many people I know who are walking around with their mouths dropped open in anger. We have all been systemically screwed: my friend’s parents, who lose their entire retirement savings due to the greed of some Wall Street bankers; the tons of people I know who are looking for work and can’t find any, or can’t find enough; those of us who are lucky enough to have jobs and still can’t make ends meet. I have a job that I have been at for almost 5 years (!!!) and there have been no raises or cost of living adjustments in 4. My benefits have been systemically slashed. This isn’t even about greed on the part of the management, it’s about simple ability to keep the organization afloat at all.

I have inadvertently turned into one of those people who is very heavy on matters of personal choice. I have no sympathy for people who choose not to work day jobs and are consequently broke. I have no sympathy for people who spend too much and end up in debt. I hold myself to these standards, too – it’s not like I let myself off the hook. I have turned down a lot of things because I was not sure I could afford them. Parts of this really hit buttons for me because who ARE these people who can just take time off, who will sleep on Wall Street, who have nothing better to do than hang out? I am uninterested in anything made up of entitled people who do not take responsibility for their own actions. (Which, ps, describes the 1% pretty nicely!)

But, being down there, I don’t think that’s this. I think this is a space that is trying to do better actively, trying to be as un-racist as possible, trying to make it possible for people to take this space to do good work. I think it’s made up of people who have tried to find jobs and failed; who have jobs and come after work; who are unemployed and underemployed. The lifestyle hippies are there too, but there’s more going on than just that.

My feelings on how the US economy has been going are best articulated by a gurgle of agony and rage and some frantic gesticulation. I feel best about this movement/space/etc because it is making room for all of us who greet the world with this rage and pain to come down and figure out what happens next. There are many steps between a gurgle of agony and rage to a well-articulated mission. But for once, it seems like the space to do that work is actually being held. Here’s to the 99%!

There are a lot of actual meteorologists making a lot of actual predictions. Already, havoc has been wreaked in Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and the Dominican Republic – and it’s coming for the continental U.S.

Over the next few days, there will be a ton of predictions as to what is coming next. As of 8am EDT, NOAA is predicting Irene’s eye will be around Florida by 2am Friday; she’ll keep blowing up the coast to make landfall sometime Saturday in the Carolinas. It’s a prediction, though, not the truth yet – although North Carolina is preparing. NOAA probably won’t release a hurricane watch/warning until closer to the expected landfall, which is sometime Saturday.

So there is lot to report and there’ll be a lot more. It’s not quite panic time yet in the United States; it’ll depend how it goes as Irene progresses. Predictions currently indicate that she is about to pass over a lot of warm water, and warm water is food for hurricanes. Irene is a category 3 right now – which means sustained winds of 111-130mph – and she could stay at Cat 3 or get even stronger. Once hurricanes are over land, they start to peter out due to topographic obstacles and lack of that all important warm water food. Notably, the islands she is currently decimating are flat and don’t provide a lot of resistance.

What does this mean for folks on the Eastern seaboard? It means we should probably go buy some water now, before it gets more likely – you should have water in your house anyways, in case of emergency. It means that you should do a little digging to figure out where you are relative to evacuation zones (NYC: you can click here to find out.) It means we should be holding in our thoughts – and finding ways to support – all of the people whose homes are already ruined. Hopefully, we will miss this, but from all accounts, North Carolina is about to get it hard and likely it will move up along the East Coast. Stay calm, get some water and food into your house, and keep listening. Hurricanes change all the time.

What does a 5.8 earthquake even mean? It is the logarithm of the amplitude of the waves felt by the seismograph, as corrected for the distance from the epicenter. What does that even mean? It means that however big the displacement the seismograph felt, you scale that number accordingly. It also means that each whole number step means the earthquake was 10 times larger than the previous whole number step: so a 5.8 is ten times bigger than a 4.8 and an 8.8 is 1,000 times bigger than a 5.8.  (Want to know a ton more about this? Like math about waves? The United States Geological Survey has a website for you!)

So a 5.8 earthquake isn’t nothing, but really, in the world of earthquakes, it’s pretty small potatoes. Damages to buildings will mostly happen when they are poorly made or very old. A water main burst at the Pentagon. That kind of thing.

So, if it’s so small, why did we feel it? It’s because this was an intraplate, rather than interplate, quake.

The U.S. east of the Rockies is, for the most part, pretty far from any boundary between the large plates that make up the earth’s crust. A lot of the dramatic earthquakes on the West Coast (or in Japan, for that matter) come from interplate activity – two plates getting stuck on each other, pressure building, until the pressure releases in a big burst. But here in the rest of the country, earthquakes are intraplate, caused by a fault inside of a larger plate.  It’s the same basic idea, but they’re harder to detect. Often scientists don’t even know about the faults until they earthquake. (That is probably not the right verb.)

These kinds of earthquakes also travel further. Ergo, this quake was in Virginia, but we were feeling it all over the eastern seaboard.

The big mother intraplate earthquake was the New Madrid Earthquake of 1812. It was a series of intraplate earthquakes felt across the eastern United States over a few days in December 1811 and January 1812. There weren’t seismographs back then, but estimates put it as a series of 4 earthquakes all at ~7.5 on the Richter scale. The descriptions are dramatic:

The earthquakes caused the ground to rise and fall – bending the trees until their branches intertwined and opening deep cracks in the ground. Deep seated landslides occurred along the steeper bluffs and hillslides; large areas of land were uplifted permanently; and still larger areas sank and were covered with water that erupted through fissures or craterlets. Huge waves on the Mississippi River overwhelmed many boats and washed others high onto the shore. High banks caved and collapsed into the river; sand bars and points of islands gave way; whole islands disappeared.

(taken from the United States Geological Survey’s website on the quake, where much of this info came from.)

So it’s not as if intraplate earthquakes are less potentially hazardous; just that they’re a little less common and a lot less predictable. (That should make you feel safe!) These New Madrid earthquakes were felt all over the United States – over an area 10 times larger than the giant San Francisco quake of 1906, which (again, without a seismograph, it’s hard to know for sure) was probably of a higher magnitude.

What does all this mean? It means we might keep feeling aftershocks, even if they’re relatively minor. It means that feeling it from far away doesn’t correlate directly to the size or damage. Especially since the Japan earthquake in March, it makes sense we are all feeling a little panic. But in this case, it is probably unnecessary. Hopefully everyone is fine, and if the Pentagon is a little soggy, well, serves them right.

This year it was particularly awesome. It was huge – everyone kept commenting how huge it was. A Japanese dance troupe came and joined us as we crossed 2nd Avenue. All the gawkers/tourists/normals were watching wistfully from their brownstone apartments and lining the streets. There were horns, a bass drum, and 3/4 of the people I love most in this city.

Every year, in front of the Stonewall, everyone comes together and sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The first time this happened, I cried. It was healing – standing in the street with my friends and community, holding each other, dreaming of a better world. And there, in front of the Stonewall, where everything started changing, where the brave and visible queers started fighting back; it was a powerful moment of remembering what it is to be free, not defensive.

This year, when we got to the Stonewall, there were news cameras all over. We knew we were fabulous, but we are rarely THAT fabulous. Photogs. Every major news station. We sang our song, we danced hard to a bike set of speakers, and we successfully held the street when the police decided the party was over. We went on and on, dancing harder and harder, everyone taking our pictures like they ought to…

And then gay marriage passed.

I am not a person who hates gay marriage. Frankly, I love it – I love anything that allows people to take care of each other. I don’t love marriage as the only option, and I don’t love marriage as the only goal of a movement, but I feel good about both marriage itself and the symbolic victory it (hopefully) represents. It’s not being able to sponsor your spouse for immigration, or having health insurance for everyone, but it’s something. (You should read this article for a better critique.)

But suddenly, there we are, the freaks, the queers, the drag stars, the dancers – and we’re being coopted into the marriage movement. Here I am, out on the wire, first Gawker, now the Miami Herald (I’m the one in green watching):

Dancing queens - I'm the one in green on the side.

There is something that turns my stomach about this other march, this march about being fabulous, about taking space, about NOT giving in, being coopted into the best and most interesting pictures (let’s be real) of people celebrating marriage. The drag march isn’t about assimilation or striving to get married; it’s about accepting that one day a year – ONE DAY A YEAR – we can take to the streets in all our weirdness to celebrate not the right to get married but the right to be fabulous on whatever terms we want.

This person isn’t dancing because she can get married. She’s dancing because Beyoncé is fierce, because there was a vogue-off, because she was taking the streets in front of Stonewall in the name of a good party and the rights we choose to take that go way beyond marriage – the right, in fact, to be ourselves, without waiting for state permission.

I’m taking my sweetheart/girlfriend/partner/shmoo pie of 3 years home to meet my family in Missouri next week. I am so excited for them to meet her and for her to see the particular swirling insanity of where I am from, bad jokes, matching faces, cranky kibbitzing, and all. Right now, I am dreading the questions that suddenly are possible: are you guys going to get married? When are you going to pop the question? And I am dreading what it will mean to our relationship if we say no, not really – will people take our relationship, or care and love for each other, less seriously? Will they think we ought to break up if we’re not going in that direction? Marriage isn’t just about solemnizing a commitment; it’s a certain kind of ritual act that ends up invalidating so many other choices. Sunshine Sugardish and I might never get married – not because we don’t love each other, but because it just might not be where we want to go.

I wasn’t marching in the street yesterday for the right to be like everyone else. I was marching in the street for the right to be exactly myself, to have my relationships validated on my terms, to feel good about being the weird and complicated creature that I am with the weird and complicated relationships that I have, inside the large and sprawling family that I have built to hold myself that has nothing to do with solemnizing one relationship as the most important in my life. That large and sprawling family is what made all those pictures great and interesting. To have us co-opted in the name of assimilation is missing the point.