If You're Nice About It, Call Me Allison

" Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being... Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is simply what man decrees...She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential a opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other."   Simone de Beauvoir "Jesus healed these women  as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out." -Luke 8:2 I was in my early-20s when I began to confront the reality of systemic racism and my role in it, a confrontation that will continue either until systemic racism ends or I die. Like a lot of white people faced with the truth of how the world works, I cycled through familiar stages: denial ( I have Black friends! I'v...

Some of them say that we're sick, or crazy, and some of them think that we're the most gorgeous special things on earth.   -Venus Xtravaganza Then saith Jesus to the disciple: Behold thy mother! -John 19:27 ​I found Venus Xtravaganza’s grave thanks to the Catholic Church. And like the Catholic Church, their help came in the most Catholic Church way possible: play-for-pain.  It was Good Friday. My service on one side of the Hudson had let out, but I had to get to Jersey to pick up my family from the airport. So I decided to make a stop on the way.  Jesus died at 3 o’clock. I was in my car by 3:10.  ——— I have a strong relationship to historical spaces and not just like a Civil War battlefield or Grant’s Tomb. If you tell me something amazing happened on an exact spot, I don’t care what’s there now, I have to see it. I don't care if, like the building where Chester Arthur got sworn in, it's now a grocery store.  My favorite memory from visiting London many moons a...