Random Acts of Observation

There are a lot of writers whose work I love, and collect without thinking or checking reviews, because I know that whatever they write will be something I want to read. There are a fair number if writers whose work I keep coming back to, rereading, exploring, for many reasons. In some sense, you coukd say that all of these writers are favourites. But if you asked me who is my favourite writer, and made me pick just one, it would be Le Guin.

It wasn’t just her work, which was some of the best fiction, not just speculative fiction, written in the past 100 years. It was what she wrote about and how she thought about what she wrote, and how she lived what she wrote. She was an inspiration, as a feminist, as a political thinker, as a human being. She did an amazing thing, something you don’t often see geniuses do. She questioned herself. She interrogated her thought and her work. She was open to finding that she had been wrong, and to showing us all how her understanding had changed. She was never afraid to learn, and relearn, and learn more. She never rested on her laurels. And in that, as in so much else, she still has so much to teach us.

Goodbye, Ursula, and fair travels.

Del Martin has died.

She and her wife Phyllis Lyon were heroes to me, from the moment I found their book, Lesbian/woman and started reading it.

I can still remember how incredibly exciting and empowering it was for the teenager I was in the early 70s to read Lesbian/Woman. My memory of the contents is rather vague after all these years, but I will never forget how I felt when I read it, how it felt to realise that there were other women - lots of other women - who loved women, that there were women working for the rights of women who loved women to be treated just like anyone else. That women who loved women had a history, and could organise.

I was already a budding young activist, just beginning to get involved with political and feminist groups. And I was in the process of coming out - though I wasn't exactly sure just what I was coming out as, at the time it seemed that lesbian was the closest thing to what I was.

Del and Phyllis' story - about themselves, about the history of lesbians, about the formation of the Daughters of Bilitis - was part of what helped me make me a stronger and more committed activist for social justice, part of what helped me to understand who I was as a woman who loved women (later I'd discover that the identity that suited me best was that of a bisexual, but there are some things that lesbians and bisexual women share, and Del and Phyllis spoke to those things in me) and part of what helped me understand that being out was in itself a vital political act.

Sometimes, in this day and age, when there's a section devoted to queer studies in every self-respecting bookstore, it's hard to remember what it was like when there were just a few people - lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered people - brave enough to tell their stories to the world so that other people like them, people who challenged gender roles deep in the core of sexual and gender identity, would know that we were not alone, that there wasn't anything wrong with us.

Del Martin was one of the people who gave me that incalculably precious gift when I was young and uncertain enough about myself to really need it.

I am grateful to her, grateful for the legacy she leaves us, grateful for her years of fighting for all of our right to be who we are and love who we will and have that acknowledged by the society we live in. The world is a better place because of her.

From rocketdreams via feminist:


The University of Western Ontario has decided to give Dr. Henry Morgentaler an honorary Doctor of Laws degree on June 16. Unfortunately, the university has been getting a large amount of anti-choice mail protesting this decision and slandering Dr. Morgentaler. In contrast, there has been next to no pro-choice mail in support, so far. Dr. Morgentaler is a hero to Canadian women for securing the right to choose abortion in 1988, in the Supreme Court Morgentaler decision that threw out Canada's abortion law.

( info on sending emails of support )


For those who aren't familiar with Dr. Morgentaler, he is probably the single person most responsible for the legalisation of abortion in Canada. Back when abortion was still illegal, he chose to perform abortions for women who needed tham, rather than send them to back-street butchers. he opened up freestanding clinics, first in Quebec, and then in other provinces, in defiance of the law, and through his court battles succeeded in proving that Canadians did not believe that providing a necessary medical service to women and respecting their rights to reproductive freedom should be against the law. He was charged numerous times, but never convicted by a jury - although the government of Quebec did appeal one early aquittal verdict which resulted in his being sentenced by a judge and spending time in prison, during which he suffered serious health problems. But that didn't stop him.

He's one of my heroes. Read more here.

Please pass this on to any Canadians you may know.