Judeo Christian Gay Happy Couple Xmas Chanukah

(Kim: I will tell you who I thought the people are for yesterday's drawing.

The hetro couple was actually you and Tom holding hands (I was touched by that). The bed was your dream (about waking up in a cold sweat). The leaning heads were you and the woman you met at the theatre. And the couple at the table—I made that up as the play you were watching.)

Wow. That is amazing. And of course makes every bit as much sense as my interpretation. Ain't art swell?

(Kim: Yes!)

Joan

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Dear Kim,

Thank you for your couples drawing. It made me what? Sad? Discouraged? Annoyed? Am not sure what, that the only happy couple was heterosexual. They were the couple that was talking at the table and they were the ones that faced us boldly, walking hand and hand into the future.

But I prefer not to read this symbolically, or I will have to write you off as a homophobe and I would never want to do that.

(Kim: I suspect every non-gay male is a homophobe...but that's another discussion.)

Instead, I am reading it as a response to what I have been writing.You and Linda ARE a happy couple. From everything you tell me, you do talk at the table and do face the future body.

(Kim: What is the future body? More importantly, I have a lot of trouble with the idea of "happy couple." First and foremost, people have to be happy with themselves and with their lives...and then if they love each other, "so much the better" (as D. H. Lawrence once wrote.))

So that is a truth. Not relative. I think it seems pretty indisputable.

And C and I are a lesbian couple that are struggling terribly.

(Kim: Why do you use the term "lesbian" when I don't say L and I are a "straight" couple."

I don't know that that is due to the fact that it is a lesbian coupling, It is also because we are both very strong willed and idiosyncratic people. But our lesbian position does add to the stresses. We don't get the same support and encouragement for our relationship from our families and the wider world. We can't get married.

(Kim: Would you want to? I get the feeling you are more lovers than friends.)

We inhabit different roles than most heterosexual men and women do. And in that sense, we are pioneers and have to make it up as we go. Which is exciting in a way.

But boy, have you been listening closely. It is brilliant that you depicted two women—I assume C and me but maybe not—lying in bed, which is a space for sleeping, talking, making love, a space of real intimacy. And one is covering the other's mouth.

(Kim: For me, it is touching the other's mouth, which has to do with the continuum of silencing to get out of the world of words that we so often hide behind.)

So that she cannot speak her truth, whatever that truth may be. The need for more space. More conversation or perhaps less. Maybe the truth of other desires.

The other part of the drawing that I really like is that you have two people emerging from the earth, with long long necks. Almost prehistoric. Like dinosaurs. They are not gendered, like your other people. I don't know if that is deliberate or not.

(Kim: They are women.)

I took it as a beacon of hope and I took it personally. It may well not have been intended that way. As a response to my personal situation. But what I got from it was the idea of rising and continuing and since there was no clear body language, perhaps there was not yet any agenda.

(Kim: Guess I need to take another drawing class. They were leaning toward each other as you did with that woman you met in the theater.)

Another way to read it might be say that an essential couple has nothing to do with gender or sexual or relational preference. So why show the body? And since so many of our problems and solutions have to do with how we think about something, why not just show the head?

I am very curious to know what you think of my response to what you have drawn. And fascinatingly, your intent and interpretation is something we have never talked about before. At least, not with any depth.

(Kim: Often my interpretation is not as the artist but as a third party. Though in this case it was premeditated (against my rules).

I know that you like to work at a certain level of subconsciousness. So I certainly don't want to mess with your process. But I am curious.

After you read what I have written, and you make a drawing, do you read it for meaning and say to yourself, aha, so that's what I think about this?

(Kim: Yes, I figure out how I feel about things from my art. It is the best means I have to look inside.)

Years ago, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer and you asked what you could do it help, I asked you to make a painting for me, to encourage me. You made this gorgeous painting of one of your characters, scaling a giant breast. Because for that character, that was her Everest.

I love that painting. It has lived all over my apt. And currently resides in the living room, next to Barnacle the fish.

Some might say that the struggle with someone, with anyone, with C, is the gift. But it is a hard time and place right now. We have been struggling for some time.The holidays are coming up, Which are important for her although not to me. There is much in my life that I cannot change. I canto change the fact that my sister is sick and my parents frail and elderly.

(Kim: I get the idea that you have always struggled in relationships—that that is your expectation.)

I work at the things that I can change and try to accept and handle with some grace the things that I can't. And you are a gift in my life to sometimes accurately point out the places that I can reframe my thinking. Although I don't always agree with you. And I really do not like this use of the word victim, that you seem to fling out so readily.

This is a long winded way of saying I wish you would think about what it might mean to make a drawing of encouragement about two women who are trying to make their way in the world.

(Kim: That's the drawing above. I have no idea if Pseudonym is Jewish, but I had a reason for crossing Christians and Jews.)

Later,

Joan

Monday, Dec 5, 2005

10:04 A.M.

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