Conversation in aaduna

I recently had the honor and privilege of having a Conversation with William E. Berry, Jr., Publisher & CEO, of aaduna literary magazine.  The journal published my novel excerpt “The Mother”  and nominated it for a Pushcart Prize.

Below is an excerpt from the Conversation and a link to the full piece in aaduna:

Janet Mason:

First off, thanks bill for your compliments about my work in aaduna.  I feel honored that you described it as having an “intriguing intensity,” “subtle edginess,” and a “provocative premise.”  The inspiration for my novel She And He, which “The Mother” came from, reflects several sources.  I review books for The Huffington Post and the radio syndicate “This Way Out” based in Los Angeles, and three of the books I reviewed that influenced me were on transgender topics.  The other major influence was reading the Bible pretty much for the first time which gave me a fresh take on it.

I wanted to write something fun and upbeat based on this landscape — and come to think of it, I did put a fair amount of myself into it.  I am tall and because of my height and angularity, I am frequently called “Sir.”  And though I identify as female, I have always identified with male and female interests.  When I was a child, I had an imaginary friend who was a boy my age who lived in my mind.  I actually didn’t think of this until now, but this must have influenced my thinking of having a line of intersex characters that are born in “The Mother” and the intersexed twins Tamar and Yeshua.  Tamar, the narrator of the story, indentifies primarily as female but is born intersexed.  And her brother, Yeshua (Hebrew for Jesus) identifies as male but was born intersexed.

I think my life is pretty normal — normal for me!  I spent a lot of time alone writing and I also garden (this summer I planted and harvested a lot of pumpkins and carnival squash).  My partner, who I live in an old farmhouse with, is retired from the postal system, and is a fabulous cook.  I take long walks everyday and do yoga and a Buddhist meditation practice almost daily, so my day to day is pretty tame but it suits me.

to read the rest of the Conversation, click here

“The Mother” is an excerpt from my novel in process, She And He.  It is loosely based on a character (Tamar) from the Hebrew Bible, and is told from the spin of how independent women and gender-variant characters not only survived but thrived in ancient times.

You can see a skit from She And He on YouTube .  The skit was done at the Unitarian Universal Church of the Restoration in Philadelphia.

You can also read another excerpt, written as standalone short fiction, in the online literary journal  BlazeVOX15

Another excerpt is forthcoming this year in Sinister Wisdom —coming out in April.

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In Atlantic City, an evening of jazz — Chicken Bone Beach — Photographs!

 

 

One of our favorite things to do in the summer is to go to the free jazz concert series on Thursday nights in Atlantic City.  The music is at the Pavilion, across from the Convention Center.  This is the lower-part of the boardwalk (largely casino-free).  I found myself wondering what the boardwalk would be like without the casinos.  Maybe not so bad!

On a break between concerts, I took and stroll on the boardwalk and found to my delight, bubbles!

 

 My partner Barbara sitting in the audience at the Chicken Bone Jazz Series in Atlantic City.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The gull on a green clay rooftop reminds me of antiquity!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everyone is searching for something on the boardwalk — there it is floating by in the sea air!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pure glee!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mimi Jones on acoustic bass.  She rocks!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the beach, near the convention center – a lifeboat, guard stand and the horizon.

 

 

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What Ping the Duck, Duck Dynasty, Same-Sex Marriage in Utah, and Most of the Rest of Us Have in Common — Tea Leaves in The Huffington Post

from The Huffington Post

Since the Duck Dynasty controversy surfaced, I’ve been keeping my distance.

Even though I’ve never seen the show — or heard of it before the controversy — I found the whole thing, well, distasteful. I’ve been a lapsed vegetarian for years — and still avoid red meat and pork. And the few times that I’ve eaten duck, I found it not too my liking. It’s too greasy for starters. And it tastes like an old friend from my childhood.

The Story About Ping was one my favorite childhood books. Written in 1933 by Marjorie Flack and illustrated by Kurt Wiese, the story chronicles the life of Ping, a duck, who lived on the Yangtze River with his sisters and brothers and his extended family on  a “wise-eyed” house boat.

I mentioned The Story About Ping in my memoir Tea Leaves in the context of reading The Magic Mountain, to my dying mother, a classic book and 700-page tome by Thomas Mann, and one of her favorites that she had read start to finish years before I was born “just because,” she told me, “I wanted to.”

Reading to my mother about the protagonist’s (Hans Castorp) experience in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Swiss Alps provided us with some closure — she was returning to a world that she once inhabited in a book and I was, in a way, returning to the pages of my childhood.

As I read, my voice grew low and sleepy. Reading out loud to my mother recalled my childhood, her voice lulling me to sleep, weaving through the worlds of Treasure Island, Anne of Green Gables and, my favorite, The Story About Ping. Now it was she who was wide awake remembering the world of this book that she once inhabited as she jumped ahead, telling me about Hans and the other patients sitting outside every afternoon taking “the cure,” wrapped in blankets, inhaling the cold air, attended to by nurses who must have been wondering if they were going to be next.

Books have always enriched my life. I am a thinking person and, as such, also find reality TV rather distasteful. Or, as I have long been fond of saying, “I am not a big fan of reality.”

Some notable exceptions have been the Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best? reality show (loved the “lesbian episode”) and RuPaul’s Drag Race.

The fact is I rather enjoy not being in the American mainstream — and, for the most part, being oblivious to it.  But when Jessie Jackson released his statement saying that the Duck Dynasty “Patriarch’s” comments on race being “more offensive than the bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama, more than 59 years ago,” I took notice.  I remembered shaking Jackson’s hand in 1984. I remembered that I was part of his rainbow coalition.

Part of what I find distasteful about the Duck Dynasty controversy is that it proves the saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity — even when it comes to racist and homophobic comments. Sales of the shows products have skyrocketed.

Then I read about the comments that this same Duck Dynasty “Patriarch” made at a Christian conference in 2009 advocating that men marry teenage girls. (In most states this is against the law.)

What the Duck Dynasty controversy illustrates most strongly is that we are more alike than different. Racism and homophobia and sexism all have things in common. In addition to offending African-Americans, the LGBT community, and women, his comments also offend those who love women which, one can assume, includes most straight men.  In a just world, the man who made the comments would be fired from his job.

In a just world, the LGBT community would not have to fight for the legal right to marry. When I heard the news about the Supreme Court putting the brakes of same-sex marriages in Utah — at least until “a federal appeals court more fully considers the issue” — I was not, in fact, outraged. But then, I am an old-school lesbian feminist activist who has seen a lot of history and know that change happens slowly.

I have met queer college students who are angry. One college-aged lesbian I met in Atlanta said to me, “I thought that the whole gay marriage thing should be a non-issue by now. It should have been taken care of before I was born.”

Amusing as her comment was (especially since this young woman had grown up in the deep South), I had to admit that she was right.

Last summer, I was married during the short window of time when Montgomery County, Pa. Register of Wills, Bruce D. Hanes began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. My partner and I have been together for 30 years and deserve the same legal recognition as any opposite sex married couple.

But after, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court upheld the state’s ban on same-sex marriage (a decision that Bruce Haines has filed an argument against). As a result, my partner and I, along with 173 other same-sex couples who were issued licenses in Pennsylvania, are not sure if we are still legally married.

It’s a similar situation to the 900 gay and lesbian couples who were legally married in Utah.

If I were a quarter of a century younger, I might be outraged.

But I’m fortifying myself for the long fight — we still have work to do.

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Trayvon Martin, the Voting Rights Act, the Repeal of DOMA and The Sin Warriors: We Are All Connected — from The Huffington Post

As a white lesbian, I am equally dismayed about the not guilty verdict rendered in the case of Trayvon Martin and the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act as I am elated about the recent Supreme Court ruling repealing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and striking down Proposition Eight.

These issues are by no means black and white. The LGBT movement cuts across every race, ethnicity, nationality and class division. That is what the rainbow flag represents. It is a reminder that we are all connected. In the recent Supreme Court rulings alone, this country has taken a huge step forward and a huge step back.

I am happy for my friends who live in states where same-sex marriage is legal that they can receive full federal benefits, am hopeful for myself and my partner that we can be part of the change and that it happens in our lifetimes. In thinking about the legalization of gay marriage and the Voting Rights Act and the not guilty verdict rendered in the murder case of Trayvon Martin in the state of Florida, I cannot help but agree with my retired postal worker partner that states rights is contradictory. “We’re not the divided states of America,” she pointed. “We’re supposed to be United.”

Look at the interracial marriage which was still illegal in sixteen states when the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virgina — ruled in favor of Loving, overriding the laws of the states.

Unfortunately, it is safe to assume that had the U.S. Supreme Court, has not reached its verdict in 1967 — that many states would have kept their laws against interracial marriage for as long as they could.

My thinking about the connections between Civil Rights and LGBT rights was deepened further when I read the recently published novel The Sin Warriors by Julian E. Farris (Lethe Press, 2012). The novel is based on the actual events, in 1956, in the state of Florida when, as is written in the afterword of the novel …

read the entire blog post in The Huffington Post

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Let’s Pledge to Boycott the Boy Scouts

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really paying attention to the recent decision by the Boy Scouts that it will no longer deny membership to openly gay youths “on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.”

When I first heard the news, it seemed to me that continuing to discriminate against openly gay scout leaders while admitting openly gay members was sending a mixed message. But there was more to my apathy than that. A quick internet search confirmed my suspicion that the Boy Scouts is a training ground for the militarization of young men.

But last Friday when I was in my driveway, packing up the car to take a trip to the Catskills for the legal same sex wedding celebration of two close friends, I had the opportunity to listen to a program on the Boy Scout’s decision on a Christian radio station that my neighbor’s roofer was blasting. The radio announcer was firmly against the Boy Scouts’ decision, and surprisingly I found myself agreeing with some of his logic. He mentioned that openly gay Boy Scouts may be scapegoated. This had occurred to me, even before I heard the Conservative Warrior railing against the decision.

He also mentioned that he would under no circumstances send his 16 year old son camping in a pup tent with an openly gay Boy Scout. He said that hormonally charged teenage boys experiment and implied that the openly gay Scout may seduce his presumably straight son.

The fact is that pre-teen and teenage boys do experiment — with each other. When I was growing up, it was known around the neighborhood that straight teenage boys were experimenting with each other. A gay male friend once explained to me that straight teenage boys actually saw more action with one another — than gay teenage boys, because the gay teens were more inhibited due to a fear of being identified as gay. The parenting website, Baby Center, has the results of a poll about boys age 11 to 13 year old boys experimenting with each other.

Sex is sex to a hormonally charged adolescent boy -whether that sex is with another boy, a girl, or a blowup doll. Chances are that if this radio personality sends his 16-year-old son into a pup tent with anyone – even avowed heterosexual Boy Scouts–that he is running the risk that his son will experiment.

As a pre-adolescent, I was an overachieving Girl Scout with badges up both sides of my sash. I learned about camping and tying ropes (neither of which stayed with me) – but what I remember most was that I learned the definition of “jerk off” by asking my mother what this meant after another Girl Scout called me this. My practical nurse trained mother explained to me that jerking off is something that a man does to himself while pretending that he is with a woman. Mind you, this was close to a half century ago. As I recall, knowing the facts did make me feel a little intellectually smug when I went back to the next Scout troop meeting and told my taunter that it was, in fact, not possible for me to be a jerk off.

A year later I was smoking pot and drinking and beginning my slide into full-blown adolescent self-destruction so it could be deduced that the Scouts did not instill anything in me to prevent this. However, when I was eighteen I did attempt to join the military and this was directly linked to me trying to redeem myself. The military recruitment video showed young women who looked like they had been Girl Scouts. More precisely, the women in the boot camp recruitment video looked like lesbians and undoubtedly this is what hooked me. I wanted to be a photographer. In 1977, the occupation of Army photographer wasn’t open to females so, fortunately, I did not join the military.

There are alternatives in life to joining the military and also to being a Boy Scout or Girl Scout. In Philadelphia, there is Mountain Meadow Queer Camp Alliance for children, girls and boys aged 9 to17, of LGBT parents and there are other similar camps across the country.

The New York Times reported recently that the Boy Scouts membership has been dwindling for years. After listening to the Conservative Warrior, I got to thinking that if he and his ilk decide to keep their sons out of the Boy Scouts and we do too that the result could be revolutionary.

It’s time to teach our children that it’s okay to think and stay outside the box.

This piece was originally published in OpEdNews.com

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