 Hello children. I get older. You get older. It's kind of amazing. My motto is not dead yet. Could we could have other discussions. So I'm assuming that you've read Bastard out of Carolina. Who here has not read Bastard out of Carolina? This means you're pissed off. It's a it's a book designed to make you pissed off. I was very I always tell people that my notion was that you are supposed to finish the book and throw it at the wall. That last couple of pages are just supposed to push you right over the top. Amazing to me how many people actually have done that. I broke the spine of your book. I had to buy another one. This is a secret plot. I Hope to finance my child's education with the broken books that people would replace. I can make a lot of jokes. And in fact, that's one of the things I tell people. If you grew up in this country working class queer Any of the various categories at which one feels constantly endangered. One of the life saving things that can happen is you can develop a very specialized sense of humor. You find things amusing that other people will just fell down and weep at. There's a lot I find amusing which let me just say is more and more difficult every day. Every day. I have reached the point. I figure it's like when I was young and I was a believing Baptist. I know you don't think that's possible, but I was young and stupid. What can I tell you? When I was a believing Baptist, I felt that it was my Christian responsibility to try to read the Bible and think religiously. I was helped along by a lot of really bad gospel music, thank God. Now, I feel that it's my duty to drag my ass out of bed, have one cup of black coffee and try to read a goddamn newspaper. But it takes everything I've got. Possibly it's taking everything you've got. Possibly it's gonna take everything we got for a while. If you come through difficult times, one develops a specialized sense of humor. Minds undergoing changes every day. Possibly yours is too. Some things are not funny. The rape of a child. Violence in the family. The loss of any sense of your right to be here. The slow destruction of the soul. The loss of faith in your own family. A sense that your people love you, but it don't do no good. A distrust of your own nature. That leads you to believe that while you might be able to, possibly you should not reproduce. For fear that you would visit on your own children. What you grew up experiencing. You know what I'm talking about. You read the book. Except for two of you over here who I will take a side later. And we will have a small discussion. I wanted to write a book. First of all, that was honest. And secondly, that was beautiful. I needed it to be beautiful. I needed the language to sing. I needed a sense that there was meaning in shaping story on the page that there was purpose in speeding blood in the reader's bloodstream. There was in fact a power in taking hold of a reader and taking them somewhere they might not want to go. And then I'm an evil motherfucker and I just wanted to mess with people. I'm going to read you a short section from the middle of Bastard. For those of you, the two of you that didn't read it, ask somebody. Bone. Because indeed he was the first to call me bone, but I'd have about a dead by the time we were living in West Greenville. Dog bone, penny bone, sucker bone, milk, tooth, goat, head, horse head, tiger bone, collar bone, hip bone, foot bone, knees and toes. You God, you are hard as bone. You are the stubbornest child on the planet. That's what Daddy Glenn told me. You are cold as death. You mean as a snake. You're twice as twisty. Ah, but he was careful not to hit me when one of the aunts was visiting and never much when mama could see except for those times he could justify his discipline dragging me into the bathroom while mama waited on the other side of the locked door. It was when Reese and I were alone with him that he was dangerous. If I ran from him, he would come after me, shake me so hard, my head wobbled loosely and he'd joke, Oh, chickens and goats got more starched to them than a boat ride. Even a half boat ride like you. It was the bones in my head that I thought about. The hard porous edge of my skull cradling my brain reassuring me no matter what happened. I could heal up from it eventually. It was the heat in my heart, my hard gritty center. I would link my fingers behind my head, clench my teeth, rock back and forth. The sturdy stock we were said to be came down in me to stubbornness and bone. Oh, I was always getting hurt. It seemed in ways mama could not understand and I could not explain. She worried about how careless I was, how prone to accident. Maybe, maybe your thin bones she'd guessed and started buying me vitamins. I did not know what to say to her. To say anything would mean trying to tell her everything and then to have to describe those times when daddy Glenn would hold me tight to his belly, call me sweet names I did not want to hear. So I remained silent, stubborn, resentful, collected my bruises as if they were unavoidable. There were lumps at the back of my head, not swellings of flesh and tissue, but a rumpled ridge of bone. My big toes went flat and wide, broken within a few months of each other when I smashed into door jams, running while looking back over my shoulder. How, how could you do that mama asked? How? I wasn't supposed to run in the house. Oh, she's always getting into something, daddy Glenn complained. Lucky she's such a hard-headed brat. And I watched him from under lowered lashes. My head turned slightly to the side, careful not to grin out of my unmarked, stubborn face. Boom, baby mama begged me, be more careful. Boy, that makes, I'm 68 years old. I have arthritis in my hips. My coccyx was shattered when I was nine. It's created some difficulties. The collarbone was broken when I was 11. I remember, I remember the terrible feeling of conflict, of wanting help and being terrified of asking for help. Most of my life I have tried to imagine what could be changed, what could be put in place that would save a child like me, the child I was. The child too many children are these days. What can you do that would offer help? I got my Wonder Woman fantasies. I got my time travel drop out of the sky with a giant sword, dreams. But what can you do? Really, there is a part of me that would like to swing a sword. There is a part of me that would like to reap vengeance. But there is an old, sadly educated part that looks at families and children and thinks more about putting in place genuine assistance, ways to interrupt ways to make change. You can't kill everybody, no matter how you might dream about it. And that is the hard part to talk about. Those of us who come out of violence, who escape violence, who walk away not fully sane, but in some sense vindicated, we dream of violence. We want a swift and effective answer, earthquakes possibly, large buildings falling on the unexpected, car accidents. I used to dream of car accidents. It's amazing what a Chevy can do to the human body if you put it in enough rollovers. I would dream about that. Imagine all the children lying in bed at night dreaming of car accidents, falling buildings, outrage, vindication. What kind of a world does that make when those children grow up? I want a world, I want a world in which those dreams are not even born, where we learn to stretch for glory, run for pleasure, swing our arms for the sheer delight of making wind, not for revenge, not for terror. Yeah, so they asked me to speak to you about this book. I've been interviewed a lot. I tell people I'm old as dirt, twice as complicated, layered, textured. And I have been a radical lesbian feminist since I figured out my mid-tween tens. This is very complicated to say, especially in June. Somehow one's immediate presence of being fucking queer is more pronounced in June. And we find ourselves, or I find myself trying to track it back. When did I know I was a lesbian? I remember when I went and looked up the word. I remember that I had been told nobody used lesbian. I grew up in the Red Dirt Country in South Carolina. I didn't hear the word lesbian until I heard it at school, in high school, and found it in the dictionary. But you had to look for the right dictionary. It's fascinating to me how the world is constructed around denial, so that even if you go to the dictionary, there are necessary words that we're missing. No, what I heard, dyke, bulldagger, them, I was them. But I did not know I was them. What I knew was that I was seriously inappropriately female. That I did not want to be my mama. I did not want to be my aunts. Now I loved them, I worshiped them. I did not want their lives. I did not want to be in the service of any man, or a family, or even in the making of babies. No matter how charming they can manage to be. You want me to shout again, don't you son? Yeah. I wanted to be something else. I did not want to be a man. For one thing, they smell funny. This is something that became apparent to me, particularly as I entered adolescence and developed a sense of smell. There's a glory, glory in being my mother's child sleeping with my two sisters, one of whom had a challenge of getting through the night without pissing on my leg and having no sense of smell. This is a wonderful thing. And then suddenly I became an adolescent and I developed a sense of smell, and not only did I realize my sister smelled bad, and she was making me smell bad, but Lord God, my boy cousins, Jesus, they didn't even seem to know what they smelled like. Frogs and tadpoles and dirt and grease, vast quantities of grease. So I found myself thinking, why, why does everybody want one? But girls, girls smelled like fresh baked bread. Girls smelled like butter and honey and blackberries crushed between your fingers. Girls. This of course led me to the conclusion that I possibly was an inappropriate female. Very possibly. No sign of the word lesbian. And actually, I did not even think I had yet earned the right to call myself a bulldagger, even though I think I heard that by the time I was eight. No, I just knew I did not want to be the female like all the other females I knew. I wanted to be. I wanted to be something not yet seen on the planet. And I went searching for it. And in the way of smart, arrogant little girls who scored high on intelligence tests, and were oblivious to make up high heels and the whole tradition of subsuming your intelligence, I decided that there must be in some book the kind of female I wanted to be. Where do you find them? Where do you find inappropriate girls except in books? Louise and May Alcott. Come on, you know, Joe, she was going to write books and stomp through the world. Of course, by the end of the book, she fucked up completely and married that Lori, which I never believed for a minute. I mean, I would have kept him, maybe, but not marry him. No, no, I had to look a little harder, a little further, a little far afield. And that's when I realized I could make my own stories. I could write about runaways. I could write about girls who develop psychic abilities. This, of course, coincided with my long-lasting and deeply appreciative relationship with science fiction and discovery of the Andre Norton books. Who here has read Andre Norton? Praise Jesus. Come on, you know which world. All of them little girls that can read minds and fuck you up if they want to. I wanted the ability to read minds, although that did not seem to me to so necessary. I mean, I could look at anybody's face and half figure out what they were thinking. No, no, what I wanted genuinely was the ability to fuck you up. I wanted the ability to take revenge on the world, or at least, at least slow it down, every now and again, stop it, make it rethink. Most of all, I wanted a way to forgive myself. I know this is hard to understand. I know that it's complicated, but I have never known an incest survivor who did not struggle profoundly with the whole issue of forgiving yourself. Do you know that for centuries, the prominent theory was that if a woman was assaulted, that she would die of shame, that there was something so devastating about being raped, that, of course, a good woman would collapse in upon herself and vacate the planet, leaving behind the husk of a body so fouled? Are you aware of that concept? I was raised in the Baptist Church, I was very clear, and when I realized that, wait, wait, what he did, wait, does that mean I am not a virgin, and if I am not a virgin, and here I am, I'm 11 and I am not a virgin, then I'm no longer worthy of God's love. I should, I should have died if you're a female and you are raped, you're supposed to have died. I understand, I understand, we've progressed enormously, enormously, nobody really believes that anymore. Everybody believes that on some level, and when you are a girl and you are full of shame, layers of shame, levels of shame, levels of horror, I was supposed to be dead. How do you forgive yourself for not dying? How do you forgive yourself for not killing yourself? I mean, if you were not good enough to have, I don't know, I always thought of it like Tinkerbell winking out, the light should have gone out of me, and in some ways the light did go out of me, but on the other level, there was a meaty, powerful part of me that did not want to die, that wanted to live, and even that I was ashamed of. How do you forgive yourself for wanting to live when you are supposed to have wanted to die? Possibly you've not given this any thought, even now, even now, 25 years after the publication of this book, I get letters from girls who think they should be dead, who cannot forgive themselves for being alive after what has happened to them. How do you forgive yourself? One of the reasons I began to write was to put on the page reinvented stories of girls, of families, of people who find it hard to forgive themselves and must go on in the world anyway, of what I know to be true in families where violence takes place. The hardest thing in the world is to love books, to be a desperate, hungry reader, and read books in which you are completely denied, books that tell you things you know not to be true, books even about incest, books even profoundly spoken of as feminists that on some level only made me feel worse about who I was and what I had somehow survived and who I was trying to be. I needed there to be some other books in the world, and at some point I decided, God damn it, I got to write them myself. And that's pretty much what I've been doing. It is not simple, of course not. I mean, let's be clear, this is a very peculiar way to make a living, telling lies for a living, telling lies and talking all the time about telling the truth. It's a marvel, I don't just fall over dead from the contradictions. It's a marvel, and it's a damn fine marvel. Instead, I go through the world leaving a wake behind me of little girls that want to write nasty books. I encourage them in the way of their ancestors. Right, nasty books. Tell the truth as you know it. Tell the truth as you know it. The world has changed dramatically, wonderfully, painfully since I was a girl. There are, in fact, far more resources for the kind of child facing the things I faced at 9, 10, 11, far more recesses, not enough resources, not enough well-designed resources that can genuinely provide the kind of life-saving intervention that so many young people need. But there is, in fact, an awareness that this stuff happens. This last weekend I had a young woman visit from Scotland, a baby writer. Not really a baby writer. Probably you should have to call her an adolescent writer. She got two books. She knows what she's doing. She's very young. She would be called punk if we were still calling anybody punk. But she's in Scotland, so they got a whole different standard for that. Very working class. And she wrote a book about growing up in care. Do you know what that means? It means being in the family justice system. It means you were rendered in an intervention. You went into what in our country we call the foster care system, but in Scotland it's just the care system. It's an amazing, wonderful book. It's called The Opticon. And it's essentially about 12, 13, 14-year-old girls going to prison for being who, in fact, they were made to be, for going into care at the age of three or four and developing a resistance to institutional maudres trying to not be the animal that those institutions make you over into sometimes. And she came to my house and she brought me a bottle of wine and a basket full of chocolates. And I smiled at her and thanked her tenderly and didn't tell her I'm a diabetic and can't even consume either one. You don't do that. Raised with manners. You take the present and thank them kindly and offer them nuts. I feed people nuts these days. I've been known to go bad and make biscuits and butter, but fuck, I can't eat those either. But she sat at my kitchen counter and told me about being in care and reading Bastard out of Carolina and feeling like there was somebody else in the world that understood the kind of stories she wanted to write. And everything that she has done since, she said, followed from that. And I did not know whether to be proud or guilty. It's been a complicated life for her, I could tell. And then she read me a couple of paragraphs. And I heard that thing I love, that life saving thing. I heard a woman speaking in her own voice preaching what was true, absolutely true to her, saying what no one else had ever said before. Not that she had invented a new language, but she had invented a new language. Not that she was telling tales out of school, you know, betraying her class, her origins. But she was telling tales out of school. She was holding her class, her origins up to inspection. She was finding it complicated, painful, and still good. Almost made me cry. I had to take her out back, make the dog run circles around her to distract her and me. I've read both of her books now. I've ordered her poetry up online. I love bad poetry. She got some spectacularly bad poetry. But I happened to believe that bad poetry is the beginning of great narrative. That all story begins with language that goes too far. Fearless, transgressive, dangerous. By the time she decided they had to start driving south, because you know, they really, really needed to go get another bottle of wine. She had figured out I was not going to open the one she had brought. They really, really wanted to see San Francisco, the legendary city of sin. I told her a few terrible stories about San Francisco. Watched her face pink up and her breath come fast and she's like, do they still do that? Let's say I wouldn't know. I've gotten a little older. Nobody invites me to sex parties anymore. But I could call a few people if you're really interested. She was interested. The younger always interested. I walked her out to her car. At her car she stopped. And she did that thing I cannot stand, cannot stand, but have learned to endure. She burst into tears, flung her arms around me. Now I do not mind women flinging their arms around me. I'm rather fond of that. I do not mind women that push their faces into my neck. Sometimes I don't even mind when they weep on me. Sometimes they keep it minimal and don't embarrass both of us. Then she'd step back from me and she says, you don't know. I used to pretend that you were my mama. When I began to write, one of the things that I thought about over and over again was that I can never have children at syphilis at 13, not treated sterile as a scraped out apple core. Never going to make babies. Damn sure intended to make books. It's complicated. The rage you feel at being robbed of something you're not even sure you actually would have wanted to do. And it has been hard for me becoming a mother. Mama and the boy my lover gave me, being mama, discovering that all those years of thinking myself, the sterile radical feminist warrior that given half a chance, handed a baby, Jesus Christ I'll boil milk, make biscuits, start desperately cleaning house and caring, being everything that I ever used to be appalled by my aunts and my mother doing, all of that caretaking, loving, bending my life around stuff. All that stuff I swore I'd never do. And there I was doing it. And then these baby writers come up to me and they look at me like I'm the mama hen and their little chicks. And when I'm not worried they're going to pick me to death, I'm worried they're going to expect me to play mama to make peace with it. Given another 70 years I might manage. Short of that, the best I can do is love them anyway. Take a deep breath, slap that girl's behind and tell her, write me a book, bitch. Go write me a book. Go write me a book. Tell me the story that only you know. Make it scary. Give me your secrets. You know, you know the thing I know. We're readers. You wouldn't be dragging your ass down here if you were not a reader. You get on the public transportation. I guarantee three quarters of the people in this room carry a book. Yep. You go to dinner. Even when you go to dinner with friends, there's a paper back in your bag, right? You read. You read all the time. You need stories. You have your favorites. Some of them. Another title comes out from that one. Damn. Louis Erdrich does another book. I'm online. I'm buying the hardcover if I can or waiting for the paper. I have a list of people who as soon as they write another book, I buy it. I have a list of people that I would gladly shake hard to make them write another book. And I have on occasion been snatched off the public street and shaken hard by people like, where in the fuck is that book that you read me a section of two years and eight months ago? And I'm like, Oh dear, I'm working as hard as I can. I know. I know how scary it is. But you know things no one else knows. And if you cannot, if you cannot sing like Bonnie Ray or chant incandescent narrative like Tony Morrison or lift the spirits of an entire room like Annie Lamont or Amy Tan or fuck me, all those little gay boys that I loved in my youth, you can do one thing. You can tell secrets. You can shame your family, thereby earning your own happiness and their discomfort. Amazing how those things go together. You can crack the fucking world open, crack the world open, write me a book. I'm trying to write you another one. I got, I'm working on two. Jesus, I should be embarrassed. Well, I am. But I deal well with it, don't you think? Shame is a state I learned to live with at an early age and I have made peace with it. I will never be, I'll never be quite who I hope to be. But then again, my goal was way past anything you can possibly imagine. We're talking magical transgressions. Not only did I want, as I said earlier, to be able to fuck people up. I wanted to be able to lift them out of themselves and take them into the world as I knew it, which is what you do when you write a book. Okay. They said you might have some questions. They said, and I might tell you shit, assuming you had a question. Anyone have any questions? Anyone wonder that or we got to go find whoever is talking in the comic tent. But the line was damn long. Air conditioned in here. Well, I have a question. Okay. Okay. What you're working on writing is it does it happen to be any speculative fiction? Oh, Jesus fuck. I'm sorry. I know that's a terrible thing to say for those of you who are retaining your allegiance to the whole what would Jesus do? I'm sure he wouldn't say fuck. But I do all the time. Yes, actually, it's a weird thing. Very weird thing. I got real sick a few years ago, and I nearly died. It's an interesting experience. I don't know if I can genuinely recommend it, but it is transfigurative when you don't die. The getting really close to dying and not dying. I recommend that because the getting really close is astonishingly educational. And it relieves you of a whole lot of, or at least it relieved me of a lot of deep seated terror. I spent my earliest years from about the age of five on being convinced that our stepfather was going to kill us in the night. And there were nights when he would wander through the house and break down the doors and do shit. And I thought sooner or later, that motherfucker is going to kill us. And that birthed in me such a terror. And my whole life has been shaped by that, this fear that I'm going to die young. Well, clearly that didn't happen. And now I'm old fuck and I'm still alive. Just kind of astonishing. But that fear, regardless, has always dogged me. And I think one of the reasons for writing is to try to live forever. But when I was so sick, I'm so sick, so weak. And I was in, I would go unconscious and kind of come back to conscious and unconscious and kind of come back. And it was interesting this kind of moving back and forth. And it was an astonishing, I kept thinking of books I'd read about people in coma. And a lot of them were damn accurate. Somebody must have been writing from experience. My experience was that it was hallucinogen. I was moving in and out of consciousness in an interesting way. Two things happened. I started having this dream. I was walking up a corridor. And like, it was in an apartment. I knew it was an apartment. I knew that I was in New York City. I knew that it was an Upper West Side apartment. I've seen how them and people live. It's kind of a Woody Allen apartment. You know what those look like? Nobody's ever actually lived in a Woody Allen apartment, except Woody Allen. And the whole hallway was lined with bookcases. And there were books on every bookcase. And in the way of us book lovers, I was reading the titles. I have never been able to go into anybody's house without reading all their titles or their books. It's just, I'm going to figure out who this bitch is if I can tell by what she got on her shelves. So I'm reading the shelves in my hallucination. And there were titles I recognized. And then there were all these titles I didn't recognize. And I woke up very curious about all these titles I didn't recognize. My son was standing beside the bed. Now, I should explain to you that by that point, I'd lost 70 pounds. And I didn't have any muscles in my legs, so I couldn't walk, which is awkward if you have to go to the bathroom and you have to have help. And if you're a stubborn, independent working-class bitch and you ain't going to ask for help, and it was just awful. So that I hated becoming conscious because I'd have to pee and I'd have to ask for help and I'd just, oh. But I didn't actually get fully conscious. I just sort of swam up, looked at him, went down, came back up. He was still there. Wasn't making a sound. Our boy is very tall, six foot tall, even three years ago. I looked up at him and there were tears running down his face. He wasn't making a sound. And I remember thinking very clearly, fuck, I've got to live. If I die, this son of a bitch will never get over it. And then I started thinking about that apartment and those books on the wall. And suddenly, like the fog coming over the hills off the ocean, I knew exactly, exactly what happened in that apartment. I knew where it was. I knew who I was coming up the hall. I knew, I knew, I knew. It was 1972. I knew. And I knew how she got there. Yeah, I'm writing the science, fiction, fantasy, time travel. God saved me. Feminist revolutionary manifesto. I ever get it done. It'll scare hell out of my son, but it'll make a whole bunch of other people really nervous. That's all you can ask for. Yes. Did that answer your question? It did. Thank you. I am like a balloon. You push a little pan in air comes out. Until I go flat and lie down on the floor, which could happen. My health is better. I've regained most of the weight I lost. I still have to do a suck a lot of physical therapy. Let me just say I hate physical therapy, but I hate being crippled and dependent on people more. So I drag my ass off and go swimming and stretching and grunting and groaning and cursing. Let me just say I recommend exercise while cussing. It means that the other people who gravitate toward your part of the gym tend to be more friendly and people that can't stand it move away. And that's all good. That's all good. So you know, next time you got to go do physical therapy because also it helps with your breathing. One more question. Yes, ma'am. Your boy is beautiful. Is it a boy? So far. Yeah. Hard to say these days, isn't it? It is. Yeah. We're also giving him a chance to tell us, but so far he's a boy and we're, you know, and actually that's I want to ask you. Yes. What, you know, when I was young, I believed that I couldn't have kids because I was queer. And and then I read your, your books and you had a kid and I was like, whoa, okay, this is like she stole it. Yeah. So so I'm curious though about that transition from radical queer feminist to parent mother of a of a boy child. I know. And and just also in I reread bastard out of Carolina this week and I was noticing lots of things about masculinity in those books that we are trying to actively, I don't know, suppresses the right word, but to not teach him since he is likely going to grow up to be a straight white guy. Most of them do. Right. And so, so we're, so I guess my question really is, do you have any, any insight to offer us? That's so selfish. But if there's anything you would want to tell yourself 25 years ago or 30 years ago, as you were Oh Lord, going on that journey, I would be so grateful to hear it. There have been serious moments in time when I would have said, think again, or just think, think, think, because boy, you don't know what you're doing. We had no clue what we were doing. This is the essential thing. I don't regret it at all. I love my son. He's quite a remarkable human being is also a challenge, which I believe is the way it works. It's a challenge for a writer because you have to, there is a certain necessary selfishness to get the work done. That's very, very difficult to manage along with all that demented mothering syndrome that I, not all mothers are demented, but I was and still am. And I think it's being raised in the South by a mother who took it pretty far. And even though, you know, it's just very complicated and getting to a point where you accept your foibles, foibles, what a great word, is necessary not to go crazy. The other thing is to accept your helplessness. I mean, there's a lot of stuff you can do and you can attempt to not, I love that you first use the word suppress and then rethought and no, you have no power. You think you do? No, no. I actually believe when my son was born, it was, Alex was in labor for 24 hours. And then within three minutes, she went into distress. They went into emergency C-section and I swear to God, they wrestled that baby out of her tummy and flat no time at all. They had, and they got me out of the operating room, but they took me behind glass and I watched the whole thing. It was like watching ER was really unsettling. But then they produced this basketball, giant basketball covered in mucous and scum and handed me this gummy thing which then unrolled and was beautiful and wiggled and moved and I looked into that child's face and fell in love. I figure it's probably growing up on country western music that did it, but it was instantaneous and terrifying and it only got more terrifying and actually even more so now that he's about to be 25. This was not something I intended. I had a whole lot of anger about being sterile, but I took up with a woman who when we were dating told me that someday she wanted to have kids and I was like, well, you can get another woman do that with. I was open to a line marriage. She could bring in a couple more and they could, you know, help her with that part and I wasn't going to do that. But she was really serious and she was real about it and there came a point in our relationship when she said, if you're clear, if you're really clear that this is not something that you want in your life, I won't have children. That's an enormous thing for her to have said to me. That's an enormous thing for her to have decided. So I thought, you know, I'm a grown-up lesbian feminist. I can go talk to a therapist about this. I couldn't do it to her. I couldn't do that to her. I couldn't say, no, you can't have children because I don't think it's a right for me. And I'll tell you the other thing. I'm an evil motherfucker. So there was a part of my brain that says she going to give birth to this bitch. I was thinking bitch at the time. Not aware of the statistics of turkey-based or birth. And I was just, I thought she going to give birth. It's going to be her name on the birth certificate. If I don't like it, I can walk. Lesbians have been walking for a long time. I can just, and for a writer, no problem. I'll take a gig in Kansas. She won't follow me to Kansas. And I never did that. I never walked. There were times it's been very, very difficult and very complicated. And there are times I have been scared out of my mind. It's been very, very difficult for him being the child of two lesbians and feminists. One very butch and one crazy, occasionally strident femme. He did, in fact, in junior high, while they were learning computer searches, put my name in and up popped the poster for the lesbian sex mafia. And there I was in Fitchnett hose in a skimpy bra, beaming into the camera. And he's sitting there, an 11-year-old boy with all his little boy's friends standing around, and they're like, that's your mama? My God, she's fat, isn't she? I'm in Fitchnett hose. Turkey, look at the hose. Don't look at the, but you know, it's been hard on him. It's been hard on us. I believe, I believe absolutely, that if there is a God, he's got a damn fine sense of humor. And that he visits on lesbians baby boys, and that he visits on baby boys challenging mothers, and that we are not going to be able to control much, not even ourselves, but we can at least make the attempt. And you do not know what's coming. You do not know, you do not know how you will fall in love and what will come of it. I don't believe in marriage. I don't believe in true love. I've been married. I'm married. I wouldn't be married except for Joel Gomez and Kate Kendall. I was like, I don't believe in marriage. And Kate's like, you got to get married. You're famous. We need this. It's a legal struggle. This was two days before the big vote that made it illegal. And she's like, you got to get married. And Joel was getting married. And I thought, fuck, they're spending a lot of money on getting married. But maybe if we're really sweet, they'll let us get married at their wedding, save a fortune and have a really good time. And not only did they let us get married at their wedding, but Joel married us because she was a library commissioner. And then Gavin Newsom endowed the commissioners with the ability. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what's going to stumble out of the woodwork of your brain. And you're going to be different. You're going to be different. He's going to be different. I can't quite say she yet, but whatever. I don't ask anymore. I'm just in spirit of acceptance all the time while being a somewhat difficult, resistant, angry motherfucker. So that spirit of acceptance does get a little thin now and again. I wish I could tell you a mantra that would make it all work. The only thing I am genuinely certain of is build a family of friends. I believe in that. And I think that's one of the glories of the gay community, the lesbian and gay community, is that we learned early on that when our families were broken, that our principle of family could incorporate those people in our life who were genuinely loving and trustworthy and that that too constituted a family. And that over and over in my life, my friends have saved me over and over. I really, really deeply recommend that all all of us honor that sense of not just community but family. The person you call when the government shows up at your front door. I know, I know they say and they're not doing that but it could happen again. It's happened before. Whoever shows up at your front door. And besides, I also recommend that you get a strong core of people who can cook. It makes a big difference. I don't want to be pragmatic but I am pragmatic. You should eat at Jules' house if she'd let you. We have the same recipe for pot roast and that makes all the difference. She's born in Boston. I'm from South Carolina. How did that happen? Now one more word. Some of you, it seems to me, are people of a certain age. You know what I'm talking about. We're old as fuck. I have days when I think, how did I live this long? We lived this long because we are necessary. I am pretty sure about this. We know things. We know things. I mean, I understand there are no more mimeograph machines. Doesn't matter. We still know how, we know how to put together a phone tree should the internet go down. We know how to call people together. We know how to show up and get shit done. We know how to pay attention. We know how to endure. We know how to have faith. Some of us know how to write or make art or sing. But all of us, all of us know how to speak from the heart and accept what's going to happen. It was a little resistance thrown in. Thank you so much.