Calling all fans! You may remember that last June, CommuniKate was named one of About.com's Top Ten Lesbian Blogs. Want to help extend Kate's reach even farther? Then please consider nominating CommuniKate for the following blog contests. Thanks in advance for any nominations - and for reading and commenting on CommuniKate!

2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
Nominations due THIS FRIDAY, January 11
Suggested categories: Best Humor Blog, Best Political Blog, Best Blog Design, Best Celebrity Blogger

2008 Bloggies
You can nominate Kate for up to three categories, and your ballot must include at least three nominations. Suggested categories: best weblog about politics, best glbt weblog, most humorous weblog, best-kept secret weblog

The full name of Kate's blog:
Kate Clinton CommuniKate

The full URL / web address of Kate's blog:
http://kateclinton.com/communikate/blog.html

After seven years of comedy coasting, join Kate Clinton as she kicks the Bushies off her payroll and gets back to work! No more easy laughs. Stolen elections, pet goats, wrong countries invaded, mangled language, sexual hypocrisy, buckshot lunches, gay wedgies. All bad for us, but good for her. She got you through the hard years. Come see if she's still got her comic chops. She's rested and ready to roll. Campaigns. Elections. The gender card. New administration. Clean-up on Aisle 5. Green zones. Carbon footprints. Guest workers. Gay lifestyles. Gay zones. The transgender card. The race card. She's a card. They don't call her Hilarity Clinton for nothing.

Get tickets - find out more - see a complete tour schedule:
kateclinton.com/kates-dates/

Check out Kate's home blog, CommuniKate, rated one of the Top 10 Lesbian Blogs by About.com. You can post questions for her to answer, answer questions she's asked the community, read her posts from the road, and get the latest news on her new tour, Hilarity Clinton '08.

Check it out >

IN THE LIFE's January episode, Wide Stance, will feature a diverse collection of stories, from a look at a film that examines biblical language about homosexuality, to a photo essay of men dancing together. Throughout the show, the ever-controversial Margaret Cho, and lesbian comic Kate Clinton, will go head-to-head in conversation.

Go to their website www.inthelifetv.org to find out when the show will air in your local area or to watch it now for free. For those of you in New York this episode will broadcast January 20th at 10:30PM on channel 13.

My Dear MySpaceCadets!

Thanks so much for finding me and for letting me into that little screen portal on your desk. It's finally spring in NYC and I'm having a hard time staying with the keyboard. In your honor, I'm going down to Riverside Park right now to smell the cherry blossoms!

My taskmastering webmistress has given me the assignment of writing a message for young lesbian activists for our newsletter. I am dawdling and despairing. Everything I've started smacks of some kind of rah rah, come on, get involved, start small, blar blar that's so inauthentic Eddie Haskell would blush.

See right there? As if young lesbians even know from Eddie Haskell. He was Wally's ferret-faced friend on "Leave it to Beaver" – a totally unironic show title of my youth – who would lavish compliments on the Beave's mom, then go trash her behind her back.

What I have found is that I don't have enough young lesbians in my life. I suspect it's not just me. I have Myspace, Ourchart young non-corporeal lesbians in my weblife. My traveling life has not been conducive to meeting and maintaining friendships with younger lesbians. In my teaching life, I had daily contact with young energy and I loved it. Not that I'm saying so come on over, I'll tell you about the old lesbian separatist days, play my Lesbian Concentrate LP, make the snacks. Although visiting your elders is not a bad thing.

So my message to young lesbians activists, and mostly to myself, is let's keep doing the political work we're all doing, and as we are doing that work, figure out ways to break the apartheid of age that isolates us. And I make very good oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

Calyx of the Heavens (heavenscalyx) wrote,


Long ago, before the wheel was invented (or, well, possibly somewhat after; I was a life sciences major! what did I know?), I was in college. I picked the wrong college to try first, and wandered around it like a lost soul, and stood outside the college GALA meeting (this was also before bisexuals and transfolk were invented, apparently) in a long black cloak at night under a tree, trying to make my hide in shadows roll and failing repeatedly, for half an hour. I watched the meeting of perfectly normal gay people through the walls of the large glass meeting room in which the introductory meeting was being held -- whose bright idea was that? -- and felt that piquant terror that many geeks feel at the idea of mingling with normal people.

Fortunately, I failed my hide in shadows roll at just the right moment and was found by a wandering pack of science fiction geeks who dragged me off to join THEIR club. None of them, alas, were willing to be gay at me, but I happily shoved the idea of gayness to the back of my head.

Then I went to a different college. I was too busy to try their GLSU meetings, but I eventually found a slightly geeky gay man who worked with me to come out to. I came out to him on one of our long, boring summer afternoons of watching over our brooding ranks of Apple II+ computers (before the invention of the hard drive). He told me the GLSU was a seething mass of politics, so maybe I didn't want to try them. Besides, I told myself, I was bisexual (this was after I invented bisexuality), not a lesbian. Perhaps there was still hope.

The next school year, I lived in a dorm that was next to a set of train tracks. After getting used to the sound of the train running by my back door every hour, I started wandering the town a bit more. One store I walked past on an almost daily basis was Wonderland Records.

I was certain it was a Head Shop.

I wasn't really sure what, precisely, a Head Shop was, but I was certain that it wasn't the sort of place a Nice Catholic Girl like myself should be. (This was before I invented paganism.)

It took me something like six months before I dared cross that Heady threshold.

It wasn't, actually, a head shop or anything of the sort. It was a record store. It sold records. You know, those vinyl disc things that play on phonographs. It also sold cassette tapes, but I didn't have a cassette player, so I didn't even bother looking at those. There was a bargain bin of 8-tracks in the corner.

I looked around the store very carefully. I found a tiny section in the racks near the windows marked "Women's". I thought, "Women's music?" and flipped through it.

I don't remember seeing anything in there except two records by Kate Clinton. One was called Thanks for the Mammaries and the other, Making Light. (This led to later confusion and disappointment when I discovered the blog of the same name.)

There was something deeply subversive and intensely scary about women's comedy, so I fled.

It took me something like six months before I chose Making Light because it had a less intimidating (and revealing) title. I carried it to the cash register with an exaggeratedly casual air, paid the uncaring clerk for it with cash, and ran for the hills. When I got to my closet-like dorm room, I played it.

I laughed and howled and played it again.

The line that stays in my head from that album: when she's talking about removing stuck tampons, she notes, "Fortunately, we have friends to help us."

Over the subsequent years of waffling and confusion, that album was one of those things I returned to like an orbiting comet. It made me wonder what I could be sometime, maybe, possibly. And every return felt a little more like home. I mean dykes! Making jokes about being dykes! How cool was that? And she wasn't mean. Well, not to anyone who didn't deserve it. So much humor about women is based on meanness.

I thought, wouldn't it be nice to be a woman and funny and not mean about other women? It sounds like dykes have so much fun!

(Clearly, Dykes To Watch Out For had not yet been invented. Or, well, it had. I remember seeing the title on the table of the women's book co-op I went to twice, and wanting to flip through it, but I ran away.)

Meanwhile, I kept getting closer and closer to realizing that being a dyke, being part of dykedom, was what I wanted.

It took me a long time to come around to coming out.

Fortunately, I had friends to help me.

---

Several years ago, while in Provincetown, I bought another Kate Clinton album, this time on CD, in Womencrafts (10% Dyke Discount!). I took it home and forgot it. A month or so ago, I found it again, unwrapped it, and listened to it on the way to work. I laughed and howled and played it again, this time for Akycha.

When I think about lesbians, the first thing I think of is Kate Clinton's voice. I didn't realize this until I listened to this album.

Someday, I'd like to see her perform live. And maybe if I'm brave, I can shake her hand and thank her for helping to make me gay.