Rock and Roll.

Every now and then, and lately more often than not thanks to my iPod, I stumble across something that reminds me just how important music has been to me throughout my entire life. I came across a real gem this afternoon while walking the treadmill at the gym - from one of my two favorite live albums of all time*, Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen, “Give Peace a Chance.” This is not the John and Yoko Give Peace a Chance, but rather an entirely different song. As near-perfect as a rock and roll song can be, Give Peace a Chance comes with the extra added bonus of not one, but two false endings and restarts, thereby prolonging your listening pleasure all the while longer. The lyrics are simple, if you want to sing along (in fact, I dare you not to) - “Give peace a chance, and the whole world will rock and roll.” What a concept.

If you'd like to hear it, let me know and I'll send you an MP3 file. If anyone knows how I can attach an MP3 file to my blog entries, I'd appreciate your letting me know.

*The other is The Pointer Sisters, Live at the (San Francisco) Opera House

It Doesn't Get Better, It Gets Easier.

It doesn’t get better, it gets easier. I remember so clearly someone saying this to my mother in 1982, two months after my father died. It was a neighbor who I figured was well-versed on the subject; she had lost her own husband suddenly, as suddenly as we lost my father, six years earlier. My mother was sobbing in her arms, and she was holding my mother and saying, “it’s okay, Marion. It doesn’t get better, but it gets easier.” I thought those were incredibly wise words then, and I still do. It doesn’t get better, but it does get easier.

Today, the 28th day of November, 2005, corresponding to the 26th day of Cheshvan on the Jewish calendar, is my mother’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of her death. Two years today since I stood by her bedside at Englewood Hospital and cried as I watched the doctors and nurses disconnect her life support. Two years today since I spent the next eight hours by her bedside, watching and waiting while she took her final breaths. Two years today since I took the nurse’s stethoscope and listened to my mother’s heartbeat in the final few minutes of her life. Two years today, and I still think about reaching for my cell phone before I remember that I can’t call her; two years today, and I still dream about her at night more often than not. Two years today, and all I know is that dreams are a good way of holding on to someone you so desperately never wanted to have to let go of.

It does get easier.

Have a good day, keep a good thought, and thanks to all of you for being there for me in so many important ways.

What They're Afraid of Is Perfectly Normal

Firstly, let me state for the record that I am sick and tired of a lot of things these days. There are a lot of things for which I just have no patience, and I think that’s a good thing. Right now, I am sick and tired of the same-sex marriage debate (although I’m willing to continue to participate in it for as long as it takes). It should be a non-issue in that it should be common sense that any two consenting adults should be allowed to enter into a legal contract, which is all a civil marriage really is. I am sick and tired of right-wing fundamentalists who use their religion as a weapon to keep me down as a second-class citizen. (And, by right-wing fundamentalists, please be advised that I am not singling out Christians; there are ultra-conservative Conservative Jews, not to mention Orthodox Jews, who are just as guilty of this as are the Pat Robertsons of the world.) I am sick and tired of being talked about in public by "experts" who claim to know who I am and how I live, and I am also sick and tired of straight people telling me I need to be patient. Honestly, I'm tired of being patient. Damn it, I want my rights, and I want them now!

On the other hand, I am indeed a lucky man. I have good friends, good health and good energy, good people in my life, I have MAC OS 10.3.9 and 80 GB of RAM, I have 5,975 songs on my iPod and room for 10,000 more, I get to travel to Hawaii by myself at least once a year, and so much more. Most importantly I have two wonderful brothers, the younger of whom, Allan, also happens to be gay. (Yup, our folks got it right two out of three times, but don’t get me wrong, we love our straight brother as much as we would had our parents batted 1000!)

The other night, Allan and I were discussing a new anti-gay ballot that will most certainly come up for a vote in California in 2006, and he brought up a point that I had not previously considered. I hold the point of view that people who support anti-gay legislation are just plain mean people, and I really do believe that they are mean. I mean, really, would a nice person vote to pass laws that would keep two people from being allowed to visit each other in the hospital? Of course not! For the most part, they are mean, insecure people, and like most mean and insecure people, the only way they can feel secure is by keeping other people down. They are mean, they are mean-spirited, and they are afraid of anything that is different. This is the point I was making to Allan. He responded by saying “you know, they’re not really afraid of us being different, they’re afraid of us being the same.” I stopped for a second and asked him to explain. What they’re afraid of at this point, he said, is that equality in marriage has become the focal point of what we are fighting for these days. When we march for Gay Pride each June, they love being able to focus on the gays in leather, the drag queens, the Dykes on Bikes in various stages of undress, anything that looks “different” or “abnormal” to them, so that they can continue to feel justified in their bigotry, and continue to attempt to pass that bigotry on as their legacy to their children. But now, when they see us coming out of the "ghettos" of the Castro, West Hollywood, the West Village, and moving next door and leading so-called normal lives – two-income families in monogamous relationships, raising well-adjusted children, having backyard barbecues, attending their synagogues and their churches and their PTA meetings, fighting their fires, keeping the peace, running for office – that’s what scares them the most. They used to be afraid of us throwing our differences at them; now, Allan says, they are more afraid of us throwing our similarities at them. Because the more “normal” we look to them, the harder it will be to convince their children that there is something wrong with us, and the harder it will be for them to keep us down.

Allan has a point, and it’s a good one, and I will accept that some of these people are afraid of us looking as normal as they'd like to think THEY are. But, at the same time, I still hold that a lot of these people are just plain mean. And insecure. And power-hungry. And that’s what I have very little patience for these days.

How Far We Haven't Come?

What follows below is the text, word-for-word, of a record review I wrote in 1992 after seeing Patrick Buchanan's attack on human rights at the 1992 Republican National Convention. While Buchanan's speech is credited with costing the elder Bush his re-election in 1992, it is an unfortunate barometer of how far we HAVEN'T come in 12 years, as it is just this rhetoric that gave Bush the younger his "second" victory. As always, I welcome comments and feedback.

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Various Artists
Red Hot +Dance
Columbia Records

By Kenneth J. Altman

In the wake of last week’s Republican Convention, which Molly Ivins referred to as not a political convention, but, rather, “a violation of human rights and Amnesty International should be called in,” I can’t help thinking how precious an album like RH+D is. Precious, because if some people had their way, this record and everything it stands for would be outlawed. Think about it. While our friends, loved ones, brothers and sisters we’ll never meet but we know almost intimately nonetheless lie dying in hospital beds all over the world, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and that mother of all scumbags, Patrick Buchanan, are given permission by the President of the United States to espouse their blind, ignorant, evil hatred for us on national television—and attempt to tell us what is and isn’t moral. Buchanan, the man who would be fuhrer, the man who vowed to close down the National Endowment for the Arts and fumigate the building if he were elected President, would cringe at the mere mention of this—a charity record for people with AIDS, meant to raise money to educate the uneducated, assist the living, and allow the dying to do so with dignity and integrity.

I mean, Columbia Records, how dare you?! How dare you assemble a ‘bop till you drop’ collection of top-notch dance music from artists such as George Michael, Madonna, Sabrina Johnston, Seal, Sly & the Family Stone, etc., and donate all royalties and net profits to The Red Hot + Blue Company, which distributes money to a variety of AIDS organizations? (Four million dollars and counting.) And, really, have you no shame? Printing liner notes which ask questions such as “What would you rather be? a) Embarrassed by raising the issue of condoms? or b) Dead?” Don’t you understand, Columbia Records, that advocating the use of condoms can lead to tragic consequences, such as allowing the younger generation the chance to grow old and someday replace Buchanan’s “Christian” hate-filled lies with non-judgmental love, not to mention depriving Marilyn Quayle of her apparent G-d-given right to force her 13-year-old daughter to carry an unwanted child to term, even if she’d been raped? Moreover, how dare you include in those liner notes simple facts about AIDS, about how it is and isn’t transmitted, and to dare suggest in those liner notes that “we can still have fun in the age of AIDS. We just have to be smart about it.”

I’ll tell you how they dare, Buchanan. It’s how we dare, too, and it’s how many of us are still alive, because we dared. We dared to tell the truth about who we are and who we aren’t. We dared to tell the truth about AIDS and we dared to organize fundraisers, benefits, Bingo nights, marches, parades, dances, etc. We fed our friends when they were too weak to pick up a fork, we changed their diapers when they could no longer walk ten steps to the toilet, and we held our friends’ hands as they died, while people like you sucked up to the likes of Ronald Reagan and George Bush and tried your damndest to sweep us under a rug. Well, guess what, Buchanan, Robertson, Falwell, Bush, Quayle, and, yeah, you too, Arnold Schwarzenegger, sitting there in that Astrodome audience looking so smug and self-righteous, don’t think we didn’t see you sitting there while these messengers of hate delivered their ‘purification of the race’ rhetoric? Guess what we’re gonna do now? We’re all going to buy a copy of RH+D and when we’re done listening to it we’re gonna dance our butts down to the voting booths on November 3. And then we’ll show you what family values are, we’ll show you the immorality of discrimination based on sexual orientation or medical condition, we’ll show you the truth about G-d’s love and acceptance, for once and for all. And don’t you dare try to stop us, because the truth will set us free. And, Buchanan, when it’s all over we’ll find you a real job, where you won’t be able to do any more harm, like maybe at your local record store. We’ll need someone to keep stocking this sure-fire superstar-packed mega-hit on the shelves so people can buy it and give hope that this plague will someday be a distant memory, much like your most recent public speaking engagement.

Kenneth J. Altman is a free-lance writer living in San Francisco.
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For a complete transcript of Patrick Buchanan's speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, go to http://www.buchanan.org/pa-92-0817-rnc.html

My Cousin Vinny/My Mother Marion

Mother’s Day, for obvious reasons, has a different flavor for me these days than it once did. No more phone calls, no good-natured “gut yontiff” which I always began my calls with on secular or national holidays, no more of that sweet voice on the other end of the line. No more recipe sharing, no more cat stories, no more laughs at the expense of public figures, no more of her rich stories about growing up on the Lower East Side of New York, no more plans for my next trip to New Jersey. Now, it’s all just memories.

Still, however, even with someone no longer physically here, there is always the opportunity to continue to learn from that person, and in the most unexpected ways.

For the last few years of my mother’s life, her three favorite movies were “Legally Blonde,” “Miss Congeniality” and “My Cousin Vinny.” Along with her other favorite new show, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” she watched these movies often, sometimes just a scene or two at a time, thanks to HBO On Demand. I loved "Enthusiasm" and I will never forget how my mother and I screamed with laughter, a week before she died, at the restaurant scene featuring the Tourette Syndrome-afflicted head chef.* As for the movies, I tried to watch them with her a few times, but for some reason I didn’t get what the fuss was all about. Unfortunately, I never asked. Save for Marisa Tomei’s Academy Award-winning scene on the courtroom stand in “Vinny,” I just couldn’t see what she saw in those films.

Several weeks ago, I decided to sit down for once and for all and watch these movies and try to see what it was my mother saw in them. So I watched them, at home, by myself, on three successive evenings. All of a sudden I got it, and all of a sudden I knew my mother all over again.

It’s so simple that I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I missed it while my mother was alive. You see, “Blonde,” “Congeniality” and “Vinny” are essentially the same movie. In each movie, a smart, good-looking woman (Reese Witherspoon, Sandra Bullock and Tomei respectively) is told that she is neither smart nor competent enough to make it in a so-called man’s world, or she is told she is either too good-looking to be taken seriously (Witherspoon as a law student, Tomei as an expert witness on the differences between the 1964 Buick Skylark and the 1963 Pontiac Tempest) or not good-looking enough to taken seriously (Bullock as a beauty pageant contestant). In each film, they prove everyone wrong and, of course, as the underdog does so often in the movies, they save the day. (As an aside, if you think that “Vinny” was all about Joe Pesci, it wasn’t; rather, it was about Tomei, and you owe it to yourself to watch "Vinny" again from this perspective.)


This was something my mother talked about from time to time, during some of our more serious conversations, that she knew she was smart and competent but that she felt she had never been given what she thought were ample opportunities to prove it. My mother graduated high school at age 16 and went straight to work, full-time, as a legal secretary. This is what she did, but it wasn’t exactly what she wanted to do. What my mother wanted was to go to college; in my humble opinion, and with all due respect to the honorable profession of the legal secretary, she should have gone not only to college, but to law school as well. But this was 1943. Of course, women were going to college and to law school in 1943, but many at that time, my mother included, were still taking the more widely accepted route of the secretary-in-waiting-to-meet-her-man.

My mother met her man, my father Saul, when she was 20. She married him two years later, on March 19, 1949, and two and a half years after that my brother Howard was born. I followed in December of 1954, and our brother Allan came along six years and change after that. At the time Howard was born, my mother left her secretarial career behind to devote herself to raising her family. I don’t think she regretted not going back to work outside the home, although I do think that there was a part of her that secretly wished she could have gone back at some point in time, perhaps when my younger brother and I were approaching our teens, but she never did. When she was widowed in 1982, at age 55, my mother had the opportunity to go back to work. But she didn’t. “I just spent 30 years raising three children,” was her response. “I’m retired.”

And retire she did. But not exactly. My mother read constantly, and she used the radio and the television not only to entertain, but to learn from as well. She was continually expanding her already vast knowledge of all things great and small. For someone who hadn’t worked outside the home since her early 20’s, she knew more about what was wrong with the world than most world leaders could ever dream of knowing. She was smart, she was competent, and of course, she was beautiful, and each day of her life she was a little bit more of each of those things than she had been the day before.

What I learned from my mother about rooting for the underdog, about speaking up when you know that something isn't right, was immeasurable and irreplaceable, and I carry it with me every day of my life. I should not be surprised at all that today, 18 months after her passing, she is still teaching me things.

In the three months preceding my mother’s passing, I danced with her at two weddings and a Bat Mitzvah. On Sunday, November 16, 2003, a week after our last dance together, my mother fell and broke her hip. Two days later, during surgery, she suffered a massive brain-stem stroke and she never came back. I was with her when her medical team disconnected her life support, and I was with her for the next eight and a half hours. I was in the room when she stopped breathing, at which point I took the nurse’s stethoscope and listened to my mother's heartbeat for the last few minutes of her life. It was the most powerfully intimate moment I ever shared with another human being, and I wouldn’t trade that moment for anything in this world. Except, of course, for the opportunity to sit down with my mother and watch one of those three movies, the most recent additions to her ongoing gifts and her ongoing legacy to me.

Helen Keller once said that she was not afraid of dying, that “...death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.” Funny, now that my mother is gone, I no longer fear death the way I once did. To paraphrase Keller, I also know that in that next room I will continue to see and hear, and in that next room I will find my mother, and my father, and so many others who have gone but have never really left me, and who still have the power and the ability to teach me new things.

If you are a mother, I wish you health and happiness today and every day of your life. If you have a mother, please give her an extra hug today, and tell her it is from me.

Kenneth Altman
San Francisco, California
May 8, 2005

*no Tourette Syndrome patients were harmed in the writing of this piece.