BY AIDAN BASSETT | STAFFLAST UPDATED OCTOBER 22, 2019 (dailycal.org)
Most bisexuals and pansexuals I know often get asked which gender they prefer. Apart from the underlying innocent (if occasionally off-putting) curiosity, I assume people ask for the vicarious entertainment: Almost invariably, it is straight people who ask me, and almost as invariably, they’re bashful but rapt as they do.
Perhaps surprisingly, I agree it’s a good question.
The notion of preferring one gender strikes me as a very heterosexual way of thinking, but preferences aren’t so crazy, even if you really like all your options. And I often used to wonder: Do I have a preference? And if so, why?
After I came out, I felt a lot of unfortunate pressure (mostly just ginned up in my own head) to actualize my burgeoning bisexual identity, and it felt like eons before I had any sexual experiences with boys. In high school, I felt I had to make an active nonchoice: I needed to invest my time equally in relationships with boys and girls — or else risk feeling somehow “fake,” as if my bisexuality required proof. But every time I kissed a boy, I compared it to kissing girls; every time I flirted with a girl, I noticed the differences in flirting with boys. So if I don’t have a preference, it’s not for lack of thought.
But choosing presumes your options are predictable, and in my view, stereotypes only get you so far. Yes, boys I’ve liked tended to be more confident, assertive and forward, ready to chase what they wanted from the start. Yes, girls I’ve liked tended to be more patient and took longer to decide in the first place — at times to my chagrin. Mostly, though, intimacy with boys and girls ranges so much that it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison.
The boys I’ve kissed, for instance, tend to be worse kissers, but not necessarily because they’re too assertive or forceful. (One time, a gay guy did criticize my kissing by saying I “kissed like a girl,” but how he would know, I’m not sure.) More interestingly, the girls I’ve kissed have typically been subtler yet more passionate, while the guys have often been less inspired, less supple and less intense. (Sorry, boys.) And one girl I dated felt my lips were “too soft” — a complaint I still don’t understand.
These intricacies and unpredictabilities of people and their emotions are generally what make love and sex exhilarating for me. One of the great joys of being bisexual is that these nuances are multiplied by the variation within each gender. Although I deplore the stereotype that bisexuals are promiscuous or sexually distractible, the universal human desire for novelty probably inflects my bisexuality; even if I love not needing to choose among genders, my mood still varies.
In the months or seasons when I want the energy or clarity of a cut-to-the-chase sexual partner, I find myself pining for the authoritativeness of the guys I’ve liked. Every boy I’ve been involved with has been older than I was — something of a necessity, given how long boys take to mature — and all of them have kept me on my toes. And in my experience, if boys are one thing, it’s unpredictable.
In more emotionally introspective times, by contrast, I crave the intimacy, self-knowledge and immersive affection of the girls I’ve dated. In my life, girls have typically varied more widely, but whether they show it visibly or not, girls are typically savvier, more emotionally intricate and more dynamic. Girls have the sexual range of boys and then some, but it all depends on the circumstances.
If I had to choose a favorite aspect of being bi, it would be the joy and variety of these fluctuations — of these celebrations of my nonchoice. After breaking up with my first serious girlfriend, for instance, I had my heart set on a boy entirely her opposite: assertive, flamboyant, shrewd. But he defied my expectations for boys. Despite being the first boy I ever kissed, he made me wait for quite some time and wanted me to be very sure of my feelings before starting a relationship.
Perhaps unfortunately (for him?), the tumult of our drawn-out courtship coincided with a renewed desire for ease and simplicity in my life, and I opted for another girl I’d been smitten with for years, a girl whom I’d thought was cerebral and predictable but who instead gave me one of the most adventurous years of my life.
Pretending I could reliably prefer one gender ultimately ignores the fact that gender or sex have limited bearing on who someone is, and any statement of preference would revolve mostly around genitals, which (obviously) vary immensely in quality. I’ve fallen in love with very different people, and no matter what traits I presumed based on their gender, they surprised me.
If I said I preferred boys to girls or vice versa, it would be like saying I preferred Braeburn apples to mandarin oranges even though I preferred tangerines to Gala apples or (God forbid) Red Delicious, which are, in fact, abominable. In short, it would be somewhere between a lie and an oversimplification.
So facing the choice to choose or not to choose, I’d choose not to choose because choosing is meaningless, impossible and, above all, blessedly beside the point.
Aidan Bassett writes the Tuesday column on sex. Contact him at sex@dailycal.org.
The following screen snap provides a lot of info: – the url – a static image of what you find when you go there, which can be dynamic – it can be set. As the date in the lower right shows, I’ve set it for my birthday. I have not yet compared this to my chart—it will be an interesting shift in perspective. – a control panel. At the top, below the URL, there is a drop down next to “Any time.” Clicking this causes the control panel to be displayed.
After weeks of speculation, megacorporation Google is claiming to have achieved “quantum supremacy” in a paper published in the prestigious journal Nature.
Why should you care? And what is quantum supremacy in the first place? Let’s take a couple steps back.
In the paper published today, the team of Google AI scientists claimed their quantum computer — called “Sycamore” — was capable of completing a task involving the verification of the randomness of large numbers in just three minutes and twenty seconds. The most powerful supercomputer in the world, they said, would need 10,000 years to accomplish the same task.
Classical computers — any piece of equipment from your laptop to warehouse-sized supercomputers — work with just ones and zeros. But quantum computers, like Sycamore, use quantum bits, commonly known as qubits, to do their calculations instead. Rather than being stuck with two possibilities for a single bit, a qubit can be both zero and one at the same time.
That means the power of computation rises exponentially the more qubits you have. With 52 qubits, Google’s Sycamore quantum computer can look at 10 million billion states at every one time, according to a flashy video uploaded by Google today on the subject. That’s a hell of a lot of math.
So what makes Sycamore more effective than a classical computer?
American theoretical physicist John Preskill first coined the term “quantum supremacy” back in 2012. In a column for Quanta Magazinepublished earlier this month, he defined it as “the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, regardless of whether those tasks are useful.”
It’s important to note that quantum supremacy doesn’t mean a quantum computer can solve a task that’s impossible for a classical computer.
“Given enough time… classical computers and quantum computers can solve the same problems,” Thomas Wong of Creighton University told Quanta Magazine.
Noting that the term “quantum supremacy” would likely result in “overhyped reporting on the status of quantum technology,” Preskill congratulated Google on their “remarkable achievement in experimental physics” calling it a “testament to the brisk pace of progress in quantum computing hardware.”
In short, by proving the quantum computer’s superiority, we are now capable of solving certain complex problems much faster than before. Pharmaceutical companies could conceivably use the tech to devise extremely complex compounds that could be used in medicine. Financial modeling could use quantum computing to figure out market trends.
And on a darker note, quantum computers could theoretically crack current encryption standards with unprecedented amounts of computational power.
But that’s all speculative. Leading researchers still haven’t found the exact use cases for these powerful and notoriously finicky computers.
And that’s why Google’s result should be taken with a healthy dose of salt: Sycamore solved an extremely specific task in an extremely specific way.
“In brief, the quantum computer executed a randomly chosen sequence of instructions, and then all the qubits were measured to produce an output bit string,” wrote Preskill in his column. “This quantum computation has very little structure, which makes it harder for the classical computer to keep up, but also means that the answer is not very informative.”
Google’s biggest rival in the quantum space, IBM, published a piece two days prior to the publication that criticized the accomplishment.
It claimed that an “ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity.”
That’s in large part due to certain parameters Google’s experiment was ignoring, according to IBM, including “plentiful disk storage,” and other “well-known optimization methods.”
Supremacy or not, the power of quantum computers is arguably only as significant as its possible use cases. Google’s team is already working on “near-term applications,” according to a blog post published today, including “quantum physics simulation and quantum chemistry, as well as new applications in generative machine learning.”
Besides these applications, Google has proved its quantum computer is really good at spitting out random numbers. That may not sound like much, but randomness can be extremely useful in computer science.
Preskill believes we are still decades away from seeing quantum computers have a “transformative effect on society.” But Google’s watershed moment could lay the groundwork of an entirely new era of computation that could enable anything from the design of new materials to more efficient fertilizers — if Google is to be believed.
Faced with the challenges of global climate change as well as the refugee crisis and armed conflicts it will create, the U.S. military may very well collapse.
That’s the dire conclusion of a Pentagon-commissioned report about the future of the military, first published online in August with little fanfare and recently surfaced by Motherboard. The takeaway is clear: if humanity continues to destroy the environment, American infrastructure could collapse and the military would be so ill-equipped to respond that it too would fall apart.
Hitting Yourself
In a cruel twist of irony, the U.S. Department of Defense was recently shown to have the largest carbon footprint in the world — the military does more to exacerbate climate change than do entire developed nations.
“Most of the critical infrastructures identified by the Department of Homeland Security are not built to withstand these altered conditions,” reads the report. It says that increased energy demands caused by increased heat waves and droughts could destroy the power grid, which it describes as “an already fragile system.”
Ounce Of Prevention
The report illustrates an increasingly-dire warning: we’re running low on time to change course and prevent the most devastating impacts of our climate change catastrophe.
As the military and the world’s infrastructure face heightened strains from rising sea levels, water shortages, and growing numbers of environmental refugees, it would seem wise to decarbonize as much of society as humanly possible before everything falls apart.
“It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person,” philosopher Amelie Rorty wrote in examining what makes a person through her taxonomy of the seven layers of identity. I have thought about Rorty often in watching the steamroller of our cultural moment level the beautiful, wild topography of personhood into variations on identity politics, demolishing context, dispossessing expression of intention, and flattening persons into identities. Half a century ago, James Baldwin shone a sidewise gleam of admonition against this perilous tendency as he contemplated freedom and how we imprison ourselves: “This collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.”
Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
During a tense recent dinner table conversation about these tensions, I was reminded of a lesser-known legacy of the great Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (January 1, 1956–January 4, 2008), who has written beautifully about selfhood and the crucible of identity.
In 1997, the Irish broadcaster and radio producer John Quinn conceived of a summer series titled “Webs of Wonder” — a modern embodiment of Descartes’s conviction that “wonderment is the first passion of all,” exploring the elemental sublimity of wonder through poetry, music, literature, and philosophy. Quinn enlisted O’Donohue in the philosophical component of the program. In a hotel bar in Kinvara, the two sat down to explore the tessellations of wonder in a roaming hourlong conversation, the transcript of which was published as Walking on the Pastures of Wonder: John O’Donohue in Conversation with John Quinn (public library).
In one of the most poignant portions of the conversation, O’Donohue considers the trap of identity, the relationship between limitation and wonder, and how the unquestioned confines us to smaller and smaller compartments of ourselves:
Every human person is inevitably involved with two worlds: the world they carry within them and the world that is out there. All thinking, all writing, all action, all creation and all destruction is about that bridge between the two worlds. All thought is about putting a face on experience… One of the most exciting and energetic forms of thought is the question. I always think that the question is like a lantern. It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves. Therefore, the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a thought that you are either blind to or that are not available to you. So a question is really one of the forms in which wonder expresses itself. One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways to wonder.
[…]
All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking… And thought, if it’s not open to wonder, can be limiting, destructive and very, very dangerous.
Two decades after O’Donohue’s beautiful words, we have somehow found ourselves in an era where even the brightest, kindest, most idealistic people spring to judgment — which is nothing other than negative wonder — in a heart-flinch. Questions invite instant opinions more often than they invite conversation and contemplation — a peculiar terror of wonder that O’Donohue presaged:
One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts.
Paradoxically, in our golden age of identity politics and trigger-ready outrage, this repression of our inner wildness and fracturing of our wholeness has taken on an inverted form, inclining toward a parody of itself. Where Walt Whitman once invited us to celebrate the glorious multitudes we each contain and to welcome the wonder that comes from discovering one another’s multitudes afresh, we now cling to our identity-fragments, using them as badges and badgering artillery in confronting the templated identity-fragments of others. (For instance, some of mine: woman, reader, immigrant, writer, queer, survivor of Communism.) Because no composite of fragments can contain, much less represent, all possible fragments, we end up drifting further and further from one another’s wholeness, abrading all sense of shared aspiration toward unbiased understanding. The censors of yore have been replaced by the “sensitivity readers” of today, fraying the fabric of freedom — of speech, even of thought — from opposite ends, but fraying it nonetheless. The safety of conformity to an old-guard mainstream has been supplanted by the safety of conformity to a new-order minority predicated on some fragment of identity, so that those within each new group (and sub-group, and sub-sub-group) are as harsh to judge and as fast to exclude “outsiders” (that is, those of unlike identity-fragments) from the conversation as the old mainstream once was in judging and excluding them. In our effort to liberate, we have ended up imprisoning — imprisoning ourselves in the fractal infinity of our ever-subdividing identities, imprisoning each other in our exponentially multiplying varieties of otherness.
Art by Oliver Jeffers from Once Upon an Alphabet.
This inversion of intent only fissures the social justice movement itself, so that people who are at bottom kindred-spirited — who share the most elemental values, who work from a common devotion to the same projects of justice and equality, who are paving parallel pathways to a nobler, fairer, more equitable world — end up disoriented by the suspicion that they might be on different sides of justice after all, merely because their particular fragments don’t happen to coincide perfectly. In consequence, despite our best intentions, we misconstrue and alienate each other more and more.
O’Donohue offers a gentle corrective:
Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us. Now, other people can glimpse it from [its outer expressions]. But no one but you knows what your inner world is actually like, and no one can force you to reveal it until you actually tell them about it. That’s the whole mystery of writing and language and expression — that when you do say it, what others hear and what you intend and know are often totally different kinds of things.
Each one of us is privileged to be the custodian of this inner world, which is accessible only through thought, and we are also doomed, in the sense that we cannot unshackle ourselves from the world that we actually carry… All human being and human identity and human growth is about finding some kind of balance between the privilege and the doom or the inevitability of carrying this kind of world.
One of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for the essays of Montaigne.
Today, we seem to serve not as custodians of our inner worlds but as their terrified and terrible wardens, policing our own interiority along with that of others for any deviation from the proscribed identity-political correctness. And yet identity is exclusionary by definition — we are what remains after everything we are not. Even those remnants are not static and solid ground onto which to stake the flag of an immutable personhood but fluid currents in an ever-shifting, shoreless self — for, as Virginia Wolf memorably wrote, “a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.” To liberate ourselves from the trap of identity, O’Donohue implies, requires not merely an awareness of but an active surrender to the transience that inheres in all of life and engenders its very richness:
One of the most amazing recognitions of the human mind is that time passes. Everything that we experience somehow passes into a past invisible place: when you think of yesterday and the things that were troubling you and worrying you, and the intentions that you had and the people that you met, and you know you experienced them all, but when you look for them now, they are nowhere — they have vanished… It seems to me that our times are very concerned with experience, and that nowadays to hold a belief, to have a value, must be woven through the loom of one’s own experience, and that experience is the touchstone of integrity, verification and authenticity. And yet the destiny of every experience is that it will disappear.
To come to terms with this — with the impermanence and mutability of our thoughts, our feelings, our values, our very cells — is to grasp the absurdity of clinging to any strand of identity with the certitude and self-righteousness undergirding identity politics. To reclaim the beauty of the multitudes we each contain, we must break free of the prison of our fragments and meet one another as whole persons full of wonder unblunted by identity-template and expectation.
Mandelbrot Fractals are endlessly fascinating. This is a video of zooming into a Mandelbrot Fractal, and one of the best I’ve seen. There is no limit to how far one may zoom into a Fractal. No math needed to enjoy this Fractal Zoom. Enjoy!!
For math nerds only: Benoit Mandelbrot discovered Mandelbrot Fractals (what a coincidence!). The math is Z= Z^2 + C iterated on the “Complex Plane.” The key to how amazing these fractals are is that they are laid out on the “Complex Plane,” which means the y-axis consists of imaginary numbers. Imaginary numbers are numbers based on the square root of -1. This alone is awesome beyond belief because as any high school math student knows, there is no such thing as the square root of -1. They get around this by simply called such numbers “imaginary!” Moreover, there is no other way to get zooms of nearly infinite depth, complexity and beauty unless you DO use these impossible imaginary numbers!
All that aside, sit back and enjoy the following very deep dive into a Mandelbrot Fractal!
Hippies dancing during an anti-war demonstration staged by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam at Golden Gate Park’s Kezar Stadium on April 15, 1967.
Everyone likes to bash millennials. We’re spoiled, entitled, and hopelessly glued to our smartphones. We demand participation trophies, can’t find jobs, and live with our parents until we’re 30. You know the punchlines by now.
But is the millennial hate justified? Have we dropped the generational baton, or was it a previous generation, the so-called baby boomers, who actually ruined everything?
That’s the argument Bruce Gibney makes in his book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. The boomers, according to Gibney, have committed “generational plunder,” pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess they created.
I spoke to Gibney about these claims, and why he thinks the baby boomers have wrecked America.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Who are the baby boomers?
Bruce Gibney
The baby boomers are conventionally defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. But I focus on the first two-thirds of boomers because their experiences are pretty homogeneous: They were raised after the war and so have no real experience of trauma or the Great Depression or even any deprivation at all. More importantly, they never experienced the social solidarity that unfolded during war time and that helped produce the New Deal.
But it’s really the white middle-class boomers who exemplify all the awful characteristics and behaviors that have defined this generation. They became a majority of the electorate in the early ’80s, and they fully consolidated their power in Washington by January 1995. And they’ve basically been in charge ever since.
Sean Illing
So how have they broken the country?
Bruce Gibney
Well, the damage done to the social fabric is pretty self-evident. Just look around and notice what’s been done. On the economic front, the damage is equally obvious, and it trickles down to all sorts of other social phenomena. I don’t want to get bogged down in an ocean of numbers and data here (that’s in the book), but think of it this way: I’m 41, and when I was born, the gross debt-to-GDP ratio was about 35 percent. It’s roughly 103 percent now — and it keeps rising.
The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it. They habitually cut their own taxes and borrow money without any concern for future burdens. They’ve spent virtually all our money and assets on themselves and in the process have left a financial disaster for their children.
We used to have the finest infrastructure in the world. The American Society of Civil Engineers thinks there’s something like a $4 trillion deficit in infrastructure in deferred maintenance. It’s crumbling, and the boomers have allowed it to crumble. Our public education system has steadily degraded as well, forcing middle-class students to bury themselves in debt in order to get a college education.
Then of course there’s the issue of climate change, which they’ve done almost nothing to solve. But even if we want to be market-oriented about this, we can think of the climate as an asset, which has degraded over time thanks to the inaction and cowardice of the boomer generation. Now they didn’t start burning fossil fuels, but by the 1990s the science was undeniable. And what did they do? Nothing.“TIME AFTER TIME, WHEN FACTS COLLIDED WITH FEELINGS, THE BOOMERS CHOOSE FEELINGS.”
Sean Illing
Why hasn’t this recklessness been checked by the political system? Is it as simple as the boomers took over and used power to enrich themselves without enough resistance from younger voters?
Bruce Gibney
Well, most of our problems have not been addressed because that would require higher taxes and therefore a sense of social obligation to our fellow citizens. But again, the boomers seem to have no appreciation for social solidarity.
But to answer your question more directly, the problem is that dealing with these problems has simply been irrelevant to the largest political class in the country — the boomers. There’s nothing conspiratorial about that. Politicians respond to the most important part of the electorate, and that’s been the boomers for decades. And it just so happens that the boomers are not socially inclined and have a ton of maladaptive personality characteristics.
Sean Illing
It’s interesting that Ronald Reagan is elected right around the time that boomers become a majority of the electorate. Reagan himself wasn’t a boomer, but it was boomers who put him into office. And this is when we get this wave of neoliberalism that essentially guts the public sector and attempts to privatize everything.
Bruce Gibney
Right. Starting with Reagan, we saw this national ethos which was basically the inverse of JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” This gets flipped on its head in a massive push for privatized gain and socialized risk for big banks and financial institutions. This has really been the dominant boomer economic theory, and it’s poisoned what’s left of our public institutions.
Sean Illing
So what’s your explanation for the awfulness of the boomers? What made them this way?
Bruce Gibney
I think there were a number of unusual influences, some of which won’t be repeated, and some of which may have mutated over the years. I think the major factor is that the boomers grew up in a time of uninterrupted prosperity. And so they simply took it for granted. They assumed the economy would just grow three percent a year forever and that wages would go up every year and that there would always be a good job for everyone who wanted it.
This was a fantasy and the result of a spoiled generation assuming things would be easy and that no sacrifices would have to be made in order to preserve prosperity for future generations.
Sean Illing
I’ve always seen the boomers as a generational trust-fund baby: They inherited a country they had no part in building, failed to appreciate it, and seized on all the benefits while leaving nothing behind.
Bruce Gibney
I think that’s exactly right. They were born into great fortune and had a blast while they were on top. But what have they left behind?“THIS WAS A FANTASY AND THE RESULT OF A SPOILED GENERATION ASSUMING THINGS WOULD BE EASY AND THAT NO SACRIFICES WOULD HAVE TO BE MADE IN ORDER TO PRESERVE PROSPERITY FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS.”
Sean Illing
Something that doesn’t get discussed enough is how hostile so many of these boomers are to science. It’s not hard to connect this aversion to facts to some of these disastrous social policies.
Bruce Gibney
This is a generation that is dominated by feelings, not by facts.The irony is that boomers criticize millennials for being snowflakes, for being too driven by feelings. But the boomers are the first big feelings generation. They’re highly motivated by feelings and not persuaded by facts. And you can see this in their policies.
Take this whole fantasy about trickle-down economics. Maybe it was worth a shot, but it doesn’t work. We know it doesn’t work. The evidence is overwhelming. The experiment is over. And yet they’re still clinging to this dogma, and indeed the latest tax bill is the latest example of that.
Time after time, when facts collided with feelings, the boomers chose feelings.
Sean Illing
What’s the most egregious thing the boomers have done in your opinion?
Bruce Gibney
I’ll give you something abstract and something concrete. On an abstract level, I think the worst thing they’ve done is destroy a sense of social solidarity, a sense of commitment to fellow citizens. That ethos is gone and it’s been replaced by a cult of individualism. It’s hard to overstate how damaging this is.
On a concrete level, their policies of under-investment and debt accumulation have made it very hard to deal with our most serious challenges going forward. Because we failed to confront things like infrastructure decay and climate change early on, they’ve only grown into bigger and more expensive problems. When something breaks, it’s a lot more expensive to fix than it would have been to just maintain it all along.
Sean Illing
So where does that leave us?
Bruce Gibney
In an impossible place. We’re going to have to make difficult choices between, say, saving Social Security and Medicare and saving arctic ice sheets. We’ll have fewer and fewer resources to deal with these issues. And I actually think that over the next 100 years, absent some major technological innovation like de-carbonization, which is speculative at this point, these actions will actually just kill people.
Sean Illing
I hear you, man, and I’m with you on almost all of this, but I always return to a simple point: If millennials and Gen Xers actually voted in greater numbers, the boomers could’ve been booted out of power years ago.
Bruce Gibney
I think that’s fair. But given how large the boomer demographic is, it really wasn’t possible for millennials to unseat the boomers until a few years ago. And of course there are many issues with voting rights. But that’s not a complete excuse.
More than voting, though, millennials have to run for office because people have to be excited about the person they’re voting for. We need people in office with a different outlook, who see the world differently. Boomers don’t care about how the country will look in 30 or 40 years, but millennials do, and so those are the people we need in power.“THE BOOMERS INHERITED A RICH, DYNAMIC COUNTRY AND HAVE GRADUALLY BANKRUPTED IT.”
Sean Illing
I guess the big question is, can we recover from this? Can we pay the bill the boomers left us?
Bruce Gibney
I think we can, but it’s imperative that we start sooner than later. After 2024 or so, it will get really hard to do anything meaningful. In fact, I think the choices might become so difficult that even fairly good people will get wrapped up in short-term self-interest.
So if we unseat the boomers from Congress, from state legislatures, and certainly from the presidency over the next three to seven years, then I think we can undo the damage. But that will require a much higher tax rate and a degree of social solidarity that the country hasn’t seen in over 50 years.
That will not be easy, and there’s no way around the fact that millennials will have to sacrifice in ways the boomers refused to sacrifice, but that’s where we are — and these are the choices we face.
This article was originally published on December 20, 2017.
Patricia Cotter poses with a Castro Street History Walk plaque honoring Daughters of Bilitis cofounders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.Photo: Courtesy Patricia Cotter, Courtesy atricia Cotter
Not far from where playwright Patricia Cotter lives in the Castro District, a bronze plaque in the sidewalk reads: “1953: Lesbian couple Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon move into their first home together in San Francisco on Castro Street. They help establish the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian rights organization, in 1955.”
Just a few blocks away, on 19th Street, is where the Lexington Club, affectionately known as the Lex, served cheap drinks from 1997 to 2015, when its closure marked the end of the last lesbian bar in San Francisco.
People stand outside the Lexington Club, a neighborhood lesbian bar in San Francisco.Photo: Preston Gannaway, Special to The Chronicle 2014
These two chapters of local lesbian history comprise the two acts of “The Daughters,” Cotter’s comedy whose San Francisco Playhouse Sandbox Series world premiere runs through Nov. 2 at the Creativity Theater. The Chronicle met with Cotter at Spike’s Coffee and Teas, also on 19th Street, to talk about the arc of history she traces in the show.
Q: What was the initial impulse behind “The Daughters”?
A: I think it was really at the closing of the Lex, which, honestly, wasn’t my bar. I had come to San Francisco later, so by the time I got here that wasn’t my coming up and coming out, going to the Lex. But it seemed like an icon leaving, its closing.
Wendy MacNaughton poses for a photograph in the Lexington Club’s infamous bathroom, for the Lexington Club Archival Project.Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle 2015
Q: What gave you that feeling?
A: It was a lot of women I know really grieving that it was closing. And then it’s like, “When was the last time you were there?” “Seven years ago, eight years ago.” … So if we’re not going — but then also the question, “Do we need it? Do we need a lesbian bar?” Because any bar can be a lesbian bar; it doesn’t specifically have to be one. But there’s something lost when you know this is the place where you’re going to be welcome.
I would have people in this neighborhood say to me, travelers, “Where’s the closest lesbian bar?” There isn’t one. Actually, there’s tons of queer bars, but (not one) specifically where you know it’s your place, where it’s created for you.
I think when (the Lex) closed, it got me thinking about lesbian history. I hadn’t really seen my history anywhere. I knew about Phyllis and Del. (They were the first legally married same-sex couple in California in both 2004 and 2008.) The play isn’t at all a biography of Phyllis and Del. It’s more of a tribute to the women who changed the world — in a room, at a party.
Phyllis Lyon (left) and Del Martin, who have been together for 51 years, are married at San Francisco City Hall by Mabel Teng. The longtime lesbian activists were the first same-sex couple to be married in the state.Photo: Liz Mangelsdorf, The Chronicle 2004
I was just so impressed with the risks they took. The women who started the Daughters were so different from each other. That’s all they had in common: that they were gay, that they wanted to meet other gay women, either to date or to just have friends, and they couldn’t do it in bars. They could, but you’re in danger of getting arrested. You’re in danger of a raid. There were tons of tourists at that time who would just come and stare at people.
We had a party for the Daughters, trying to get the word out (about the show). My friends threw it at their house, and there were tons of lesbians and straight people and gay guys. It was just a party, and I thought, “Oh, 60 years ago this was transgressive — to gather in someone’s home.”
It is specifically my history, but I’m kind of embarrassed by how little I knew about it.
Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin at their San Francisco home.Photo: Clem Albers, The Chronicle 1972
Q: How much did you know before you wrote?
A: I think my knowledge was like 25%. I interviewed a ton of different lesbians … younger lesbians, older lesbians, women my age, and, for the second act, trans men, to get a point of view that felt accurate and honest.
Q: What surprised you from the research?
A: The women in this group were teachers, government workers, so they really had everything to lose by coming out. If you got arrested, they put your name in the paper, they put your address in the paper, your place of work — that’s everything. That’s one of the things we’ve been working on in the production — to create that sense of danger in the room, like the danger of getting into the room and the danger of leaving the room. Then you get this break when you’re in the physical space.
You’re taking a big risk. I think that was partly one of the things I learned as well: what a need it is to be yourself and have an honest, authentic representation of who you are. How much courage it would take to make that happen and then invite people into your home! It takes courage to go, but they didn’t know who would show up. They had no idea.
Phyllis Lyons and Del Martin, grand marshals of the Gay Freedom Day Parade on the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.Photo: Tom Levy, The Chronicle 1989
Q: And what did you learn from your interviews?
A: For young women, the relationship to the word “lesbian.” Some women were very much like, “I don’t need it. I don’t like it. It doesn’t make sense for me.” Other young women still really wanted to claim it, saw value to it.
Q:What’s your own feeling about the word, for yourself?
A: I like it. It’s never been unappealing to me. My whole feeling about words in general — and that’s basically what the second act is about — is the idea of “you tell me.” Whatever works for you, I want to include. At a certain point, we needed a word to identify each other and find each other. Now what if we don’t need that word any more? But what if you want it?
I’m excited by the changing of language, and I’m excited to incorporate that in my life. I don’t understand a resistance to it. To me, if “lesbian” goes away, which it seems like maybe someday it will, I will miss it. I will grieve it. But if that’s the natural way we’re moving, if that’s where momentum is taking us … .
In 1955, the first meeting of the Daughters of Bilitis gets off to an uneven start as members Evelyn (Olivia Levine, left), Mal (Katie Rubin), Griff (Molly Shaiken), Shorty (Em Lee Reaves) and Peggy (Erin Anderson) meet for the first time in San Francisco Playhouse’s “The Daughters.”Photo: Jessica Palopoli, San Francisco Playhouse
Q: What do you think of a San Francisco that doesn’t have a bar dedicated to lesbians?
A: I can’t believe it. If there were no gay male bars — Look at my neighborhood! That’s all there is! — it would be front page news. (The Lex) got a little coverage, but not that much.
Q: For the two groups of women from the two different eras in your play, in what ways are their concerns the same, and in what ways have they evolved?
A: Jessica (Holt, the show’s director) has been helping me find the thread, where they connect. The idea in the first act — they’re trying to claim their space. In the second act, they’re losing that space. In just the space of 60 years — that’s not a lot of time to have your space, experience your space and then, “Wait! It’s gone already! It’s gone so fast!”
Also, in the first act, they’re trying to, “If we want to be ourselves, we have to change. We have to be presentable, and we have to not scare the outside world.” In the second act, it’s more, “We are part of the outside world. We don’t need to worry about that anymore, which is why we don’t need this space.”
And then there are the simple connections of wanting to be in love and wanting to find your person and wanting to have fun — and then the other thing is not wanting to talk about politics, but there’s someone saying, “You know what, guys, it is political.” … Even though in the first act and the second act there’s this thing of “Oh my god, can we just have a good time?” it’s like, “Yes, we can, but somebody has to be the person going, ‘Hold up. We have to take this seriously.’”
“The Daughters”: Written by Patricia Cotter. Directed by Jessica Holt. Through Nov. 2. $30-$40. Creativity Theater, 221 Fourth St., S.F. 415-677-9596. www.sfplayhouse.org
Follow:Lily JaniakLily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak
[Phyllis Lyon and the late Del Martin are veterans of The Prosperos.]
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