Today I got up at 5:00am in order to be fully ready for the funeral of my dear friend Is Szoneberg in Hawick, Scotland. I joined the funeral by Zoom, with a perspective from the rear of the hall, and even without the intimacy of sitting among loved ones, I was profoundly moved by the service. It opened with Elvis singing “Only Fools Rush In.” Is requested we wear pink, her favorite color. Our colleague and friend Jane told me that she wore pink under her scrubs at work this morning, since she had to miss the service.
It was conducted by a Humanist celebrant, which means no mention of any gods or religion – just to my taste. The facilitator is a lesbian and she was able to convey an accurate and authentic impression of our Is (Isobel; Isabella) and of her commitments to her sweet wife Anne (“my best girl” she always said) and to the community of women. It was an exquisite, heartfelt celebration.
Is and Anne pushed past every obstacle to social recognition of their love over decades. When civil unions were finally available, they got a civil union. When marriage was finally available, they got married. They were fully committed and they wanted the world to know.
Is got a form of cancer that is a silent killer and by the time it was found, it was much too late to do anything about it. She was sent home to receive palliative care and to say her goodbyes. Is wrote to tell me the bad news and Anne facilitated a phone conversation between Is and me that lasted three quarters of an hour. I thought I’d be able to have one more call with her, but she was already unresponsive the following week.
When I got the job as London Manager at CSV (Community Service Volunteers) in 1991, Is was then Scotland Manager. We bonded very quickly, being the only two lesbian managers in this large UK non-profit. Her wit and her sincerity won her great popularity on the Management Team. Everyone appreciated her remarkable ability to use good humor to calm down disagreements in the Team.
Is and I socialized outside of work when she was in London or when I visited her in in the north of England, where she was living when we first met. My first experience of karaoke was when Is, after some liquid encouragement, was persuaded to take the mic in a bar there and let loose.
Fast forward a decade, during which both of us earned multiple promotions, when due to some so-called “re-structuring,” all middle managers were let go, myself included.
Because I was in my 50s, it was hard to find another job and I began to freak out. I had been supporting myself since the age of 17 and it was terrifying to be out of work. Is began to call me daily. I mean every single solitary day. She called me without fail for almost a year until I finally accepted a job in the States and flew to Boston. I will never forget that profound act of kindness and support, her sense of solidarity and friendship, her generous love. I will never forget Is.
I am SO thrilled to see my short story The Lipstick Assault in Serene Manor, about being an old dyke in a nursing home, published in the September issue of the fantabulous Gertrude Press!!
May 15 2021 Today’s Nakba / #FreePalestine demonstration in Boston in solidarity with the Palestinian people was heartening in these dark times for Gaza. There were thousands and thousands and thousands of mostly young people, many of them diaspora Palestinians. All the speakers except one were women, and all talked about how no one can be free until everyone is free. They called out for “Black liberation, Indigenous liberation, and queer liberation!” One speaker led a chant: Up with the Jewish people; down with the Zionists. My sign “Another Jew Against the Brutal Occupation of Palestine” was well received, with Palestinian youth asking to take selfies with me.
It was my first time in a crowd since Covid, and what a crowd! Packed, singing, chanting, passionate -- just amazing. It was noisy and high-energy and there was nowhere I more wished to be than in the midst of these young people with their intersectionality and vitality.
I admit it. I’ve only used pre-cooked sausages in my kitchen. And sausage only became part of my menu when I found them at Trader Joe’s. Little did I suspect that sausage – a word that in my house growing up implied non-Kosher sawdust swept up from the dirty factory floor stuffed into old pig intestines - came in such varied and delish forms.
This weekend I had a high-level Sausage 101 tutorial. At a neighborhood store that does curbside, I bought some Pig Rock Sausages with chicken, real maple syrup, and garlic. Yum. But they arrived all squishy and plump, i.e. completely uncooked, unlike the ones I get from Trader Joe’s. I started to sauté them but quickly realized that in truth I had not a clue what to do. I Googled and searched and finally called the company – their number was readily available – and left a message at the impossible hour of 6:00 Friday night: “Help! The sausages are cooking in a stovetop pan in medium heat. Is that right? How long should I cook them?” I also posted a message on their Facebook page.
A man called me back minutes later and talked me through (about 7 minutes on each side) while giving me the basic 411 on fresh, pure sausages. Pig Rock Sausages turns out to be a Boston-based company formed by Art Welch, a very special executive chef. The person who called me was none other than Art Welch himself. He also responded to my FB message.
The meat turned out scrumptious. It transpires that there are many types of additive- and preservative-free Pig Rock Sausages to be had – from Bratwurst to Sweet & Hot Italian and more.
Congratulations Art Welch on your amazing products, but even more on your willingness to spend some of your weekend explaining to a woman in her 70s who has never much learned to cook how to pamper her taste buds.
This tribute was adapted from a brief portrait of Lois Johnson that I wrote when she and her life partner Sheri Barden were among the honorees at an event I MC'd held by Rally, a Boston area group for older lesbians. Lois died yesterday. Sheri and Lois (in pink) are seated in front.
Lois Johnson was a local girl: she was born in Stoneham in 1931 but raised in Everett by a loving extended working class family. She was always a straight-A student in high school. At Boston University, she studied English and childhood education, planning to be a school teacher like her older sister. Lois was very active in the Christian Science church, teaching Sunday school and conducting services, but, she told me, “I wasn’t Miss Goody-Twoshoes.” Immediately I heard Sheri in the background yelling, “Yes you were!”
Lois worked in education for a couple of years, but she wasn’t that comfortable with it. So she got another a degree from BU: this time in journalism. She moved to California where she was a success in the field of advertising and journalism and worked for the Presidio army base newspaper, while living at the YWCA.
When her father became ill, she returned to Boston where she continued to be active in the Christian Science church. She met her first girlfriend and lived together in secret for five years. When in 1964 that woman foolishly dumped our Lois, some gay men fixed her up with Sheri Barden who moved in with her in Brookline.
When they rented and restored a 19th C house near the MFA, they decided they liked that kind of thing. Because banks would not then give mortgages to women, a gay male friend helped them to get a fixer-upper in the South End. When Lois’s long-time job as a producer at WGBH evaporated, she decided to go into real estate, where she spent 40 years. She missed that work after retiring.
About five years ago Lois fell and broke her hip so she and Sheri had to move out of their house with many stairs. The were welcomed with great enthusiasm by Springhouse, an elegant assisted living facility. Like in any such institution, the women ran into homophobic staff occasionally. They had their strategy for dealing with it, however. Said Sheri, "I'm so nice to them, they can't help but love us."
In fact, the very evening they moved in, the Springhouse administration wanted to screen "Gen Silent" (dir: Stu Maddux), a powerful, historic film about the intersection of queer and elder, which kicked off a vibrant movement around the rights of old LGBTQ people. Lois and Sheri were two of the stars of the film (and of the movement), and their wit and candor and obvious love won the hearts of all who saw it. Sheri insists that their role was to be "comic relief," and the women sighed over having to see the film dozens and dozens of times when they appeared at sell-out screenings.
For 15 years Lois was President of Boston’s DOB – Daughters of Bilitis – perhaps the first lesbian organization with chapters across the country. Sheri and Lois welcomed hundreds of otherwise isolated lesbians to their rap sessions. They embraced women who needed someone to talk to, someone to assure them that their feelings were legitimate. Sheri told me: “Lois was a wonderful leader because she didn’t judge anyone – never put anyone down, everyone was welcome.”
The death of Lois Johnson leaves a rip in the fabric of the Boston queer community. On a personal note, I was always gratified by Lois' close readings and gracious comments about my books. The couple never missed a reading when I was introducing a new book. Lois' generosity, dry wit, and loving presence will be profoundly missed.
This is the trailer for "Gen Silent." If you haven't seen it, you haven't seen one of the best documentaries evah!
Prepare your hanky and your deepest thoughts about the future when you watch the poignant Netflix documentary Secret Love. Director Chris Bolan traces his great-aunt, Terry Donahue, and her life partner, Pat Henschel, from their love-at-first-sight romance in the 40s through their struggle as ailing elders. Bolan’s mother Diana is the third major figure of the film, as she struggles with Pat over the best way to support Aunt Terry in her decline.
The lovers met the year I was born, 1947, while Terry was a Canadian star of the Peoria Redwings – a team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (which inspired A League of Their Own.) They only came out to Terry’s beloved family in 2009, living in a sometimes brutal, if love-filled closet, all that time. With remarkable footage and stills from back in the day, we see how they constructed a life in Chicago of fierce devotion, building friendships with other queers. The film shorts us on what this life was: we see only one dinner shared with a couple of gay men who are clearly central to their community, but we are given no sense of how the advent of gay liberation, with its new institutions and cultural opportunities, affected them – as it surely did.
The ways in which homophobia impacted them is encapsulated by Diane’s discovery of Pat’s love letters to Terry, from which the bottom signature has been ripped off to protect their identity. Pat is alienated from her own family, but unfortunately not entirely embraced by Terry’s. The reasons why they came out so late to Terry’s family remain under-explored, but we get a hint when one niece is outraged at having been deprived of this information (it’s all about her) while she is scandalized that they are living in sin. Pat is only too aware that in this family she is mainly seen as an impediment to Terry’s return to Canada, and not always as the solicitous life-partner she has been.
If gay people had made this film, it might have looked very different. The years of their Chicago life together and the social fabric they wove would have had more primacy. Their relationship may have remained a secret to the family – and there must have been good reason for that – but surely they were more open within the life they built for themselves.
On a personal level, the film reminded me of how our worlds shrink if we make it to old age, with our peers dead or ailing or retired in Florida or returned to distant home towns. Those with younger family members who give a shit have a lifeline, but those of us without close bio families are too often thrown onto the trash-heap of impersonal if not homophobic social services. We pioneers have failed to build any solid intergenerational network. The LGBTQ movement seems to have more cross-generational disdain, in both directions, than connection.
I wept throughout this film, most especially at the barriers to their love, prior to the 70s, and then at what ill health does to this couple’s independence. Sufficient hard-earned savings and Terry’s family’s concern allow them safe solutions in which to thrive. But I wept for those without money or loyal young people to shepherd them to the end.
Today is the 100th anniversary of my mother Phyllis’s birth. She was mean to me as long as she lived. She lied. She was violent. She was jealous. She was a tangle of affectations she thought made her seem middle-class.
My childhood memories are dim and unhappy – there aren’t long narratives to spin. So I have written about this period in chapters of 100 words. Exactly. Not 99 words and not 101. This form allows me to tell about as much as I am willing to recall of my childhood, one in which I was the captive of the nuclear family, a private turf where no one in the 1950s would think of intervening, even if violence and cruelty were obvious.
Here are three chapters that relate to Phyllis.
The Day I was Gendered in 100 Words I was born in August Wilson’s Hill District projects. At 3 we moved to a tiny duplex and at 10 we moved to an attached row house – my mother’s determined ascent up the working-class ladder. I was a kid like other kids, playing summer kickball shirtless in the alley behind our row. Until one boy’s snobby mother turned up at our door saying she didn’t want her son playing with a whore. My mother dragged me from the alley by the ear and drove me straight to Woolworth’s to be fitted in the aisle with a training bra. Public humiliation.
Murder and Revenge in 100 Words “Pets are dirty,” my mother said, forbidding them. Until at Woolworths I saw the turtle in its plastic dish, complete with a pond and palm tree. I had saved up enough dimes from scrubbing the kitchen floor to buy it for myself. That summer I went to sleep-over camp for the first and only time. My mother promised to keep the turtle pond full of water and the pet fed. On my return, I found the turtle swollen up like a ping-pong ball, dead in a dry plate. I buried it under her beloved hydrangeas bush, which never again bloomed.
Phyllis’s Shoe in 100 Words My mother blamed me for a long labor during which my father abandoned her to go bowling. My dad, Saul, and I were always tight. My first memory is when I was 5 and Phyllis shrieked at me, “He’s mine! Get your own!” I was 11 when my mother scraped the side of the car in a parking lot. Later she told Saul it happened while we were inside shopping. When I contradicted her, she removed her high-heeled shoe to punish me for lying and for trying to turn Saul against her. I still have those scars on my thigh.
My mother, full of airs and graces, named me Suzan. I always hated it. As a child, some people called me Susie, and some called me Sue.
Once I went out into the world at 17, I preferred the name Katz, which I associate with my dad, whom I loved. It suits me so much better. I published all my essays and short stories in the 70s under the name Katz. Then I went abroad.
When I lived in Israel, people did not know the name “Sue” – it didn’t really sound like a name to Israelis. And the name Katz is full of meaning. It is an ancient name and is actually an acronym made of the first letters of the words Cohen and Tzaddik. The Cohens were the priestly class in the days of the Temple (1000 BCE), and the Tzaddikim were the Righteous or High Priests. Probably crazed Fundamentalists. So I could not really go around there with the name Katz. In the end, my students determined my name: Suekatz, with the emphasis on the first syllable.
When I lived in London throughout the 90s, my political and work friends knew me as Sue – Katz was far too a Jewish name to attempt in a country that had in the 15th Century expelled or killed all the Jews who would not convert. But the center of my life was dance, specifically “gay and lesbian dance,” as it was then known. Because I scored quite a serious job in London, with an international platform, I didn’t want to mix my writing with my work. I thought the queer things I wrote could lose me my job. It happened that my Boston friends Stan and Gladys were visiting and as we sat on the banks of the Thames, with much hilarity we came up with the pen name Spike (a name I used as a baby butch in the 60s for a quick minute) Pitzberg (a Jewish-ish re-spelling of my home town.) I wrote an article about our dance classes for the local gay paper and the next week, participation tripled. I was forever known, in London, as Spike because of that.
Since returning to the States twenty years ago, I’m running with multiple names. My very close friends from college, whose community in Vermont is the closest thing I have to “home,” call me Katz and Uncle Katz and Katzeleh. Some old comrades from the revolutionary days of the 60s and 70s call me Katz. One of them, my old buddy Maddog, calls me Q. If I had thought it through when I got back to Boston, I would’ve been more conscious about wanting to be Katz again. But I didn’t push it hard enough, which was a big mistake on my part. My friends from our group Jewish Women for Justice in Israel/Palestine call me Katz, Katzeleh, and even Katzilla – the concoction of a Swiss friend. But they are the exception: most new (since 2000) people know me as Sue.
The pandemic reminds me that, at 72, even with luck getting through this public health catastrophe, every moment is a moment that should not be wasted. Every available delight is one to be embraced. I’m using my best bowls and glasses – instead of saving them for gawd knows what. And as every revelation and every connection and every means of finding comfort is precious, why should I be called by a name I don’t like, instead of one I love?
I want to break with the tyranny of the first name and return to my young adulthood when I claimed my last name. For who decides that first names must predominate, when one has such an honorable and ancient last name? Of course, as a writer, I remain Sue Katz. But in personal exchanges, if it doesn’t feel too awkward or too difficult for you, do me the pleasure of calling me Katz.
I had the old shingles shot (Zostavax) a decade or so ago. But for the last couple of years I’ve been urged to get the new shot, Shingrix. I would’ve done so immediately, but it is never available. Plus, it is hideously expensive, even on Medicare. It seems that insufficient amounts of this vaccine are produced in fits and starts and if you don’t happen to be aware that it is available, you have to hope that the next round might include you.
I had the first of two Shingrix shots, at last, on Tuesday. I thought my Dr’s office was going to administer it, but I got a call from my Rx insurance saying I had to have it at Walgreens, and yes, they cover it. It took my pharmacist two days to carve out time to vaccinate me and it cost me $185. I think my insurance kicked in a dozen dollars.
I was warned about the side effects: sore arm at the shot site (that more or less faded after 5 days); a rash (yeah, I got a small rash a few days ago which has faded away); and exhaustion.
Which brings me to today: National Napping Day. Since receiving the shot, I have found that my regular dozy afternoon slump has turned into a three-hour nap-of-the-dead. About 2:30 or 3:00 I crawl to my bedroom, fall onto the bed in all my clothes, and three hours later I come awake after a blacked-out sojourn in Never-Never-Land. This is happening day after day after day. Yesterday I was out of the house at an event so I didn’t get my nap and, damn it, I was wiped.
Why is this shot so important? Because shingles (a kind of reactivation, usually in elders, of chickenpox) SUCKS! I was traveling with my cousin when she got shingles around her torso, a thick band of weeping raw sores that were viciously painful and persistent. I will never forget how she heroically endured this gruesome condition.
So I’m not complaining about the naps which have become part of my day. In fact, I’m proud to fit in with the other celebrants of National Napping Day. I would continue with this post, but I feel a duvet calling my name.
In the U.S., Zostavax and Shingrix are FDA-approved vaccines to help prevent the occurrence of shingles. In studies, compared with placebo, Shingrix significantly reduced the risk of developing shingles by 90 to 97% in subjects 50 years and older. Merck’s Zostavax, compared to placebo, significantly reduced the risk of developing zoster by 69.8% in those 50 to 59 years old, and by 51% in subjects 60 and older overall. However, in patients 80 years and older, Zostavax was only 18% effective while Shingrix was 89.1% effective in preventing shingles in this older, at-risk, age group. There are no head-to-head studies.
All my adult life I have feared that in my old age, when I couldn’t work, that I would be a "bag lady". I knew I would never have a husband or children to support me: that I was and would be on my own. Recently, I see the women with shopping carts piled with bottles and cans, and recall all my fears. However, I now realize that, in fact, I’m okay in my retirement. That I will be okay. It is hard to adjust to this idea: that I will be able to afford my rent for the next 15 years (or so?) that I have left.
I collect all my bottles and cans and keep them in bags in the back seat of my car. The other day I am coming out of my building’s garage and a slender figure is on tippy-toes using a tree branch to try – I suspect – to fish out cans from our dumpster.
I pull over at the end of the driveway and call to the person: “Are you looking for cans?” No reaction. After a couple of more tries I realize that they can’t hear me or perhaps understand me. So I jog to the dumpster and step into sight-line and see that yes, she is fishing for cans. She is wizened and dressed in piles of clothing and looks frozen. She is so emaciated that I cannot even guess at her age or race.
I run back and forth to my car four times. First, I get out a big plastic bag of bottles and cans; then I return for a paper bag full of cans that I had forgotten about. It isn’t enough. I run back to the car and get out some money and race back to give it to her. And then finally, I realize that she is wearing a kind of plastic fake-leather jacket and must be freezing, so I return to the car to get the lovely purple fleece that my friend Jaya bought for my birthday and which I keep in the car for the frequent times I’ve misjudged the weather, and I give it to her. She says, “Too much, too much.” She leaves the driveway and I get into my car. As I pull out, I see her going to the back of the building across the way to where they keep their dumpster.
I have solved nothing for her. I have solved nothing for the many women, men, and children out on the streets. I am choked up – even now days later as I write this – because I am only too aware that the only solution to social problems like poverty and homelessness are social solutions. Laws that protect us; institutions that serve us; safety nets that catch us – and the present regime is busy undoing all the shards of support that remain. We are all in for heart-breaks – some so much more than others.
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