Equal?

I spent some time this weekend with a lot of lesbians. I love lesbians, I may even be one. I've been in love with women before, even had a girlfriend or two. The fact that the love of my life and life-partner is male is kind of irrelevant. I love his heart and his brain, not his maleness. If he was a woman, I'd still be in love with that heart and brain.

Many of the women at the National Women's Music Festival were completely accepting of his presence this weekend, even though it seemed at times he was the only man there. But over and over I was questioned about him. It seemed really strange to me to have to explain his presence. I don't define myself in terms of my sexual orientation, probably because it's totally unreliable. So it was strange to even have it come up. I'm a MUSICIAN. And a woman. And I'm in a long-term monogamous relationship with a man. So he was there with me because he's my life-partner, and my best friend, and a musical collaborator/co-writer, and willing to carry heavy stuff . . . But I do want to clarify, we did not feel unwelcome and there was no animosity toward him or toward me. What I am saying is, this experience of reversal opened my eyes to a new way of looking at the inequality that women experience, and the extreme inequalities that the LBGT community lives with on a daily basis. And that makes women's events, including music festivals, exceedingly important. I wish they weren't. But clearly they are. I am a white woman who is viewed by society as straight. I am so privileged that I didn't notice what was going on all around me.

My entire motivation here is the idea of equality. I live in a country where people are singled out for the damndest things - the color of their skin, the shape of their eyes, the people they love. And it's total bullshit. We have to understand that first we are human. First we are human. We are leaves on a branch of a tree that has more rings than we can count. We are all made of the same stuff, which all comes from stars exploding out in the galaxy somewhere. We're bits and pieces of who knows how many different planets and stars and asteroids and meteors . . . And we're babies. The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. We've been around less than 1 million of those years, and we've been truly creative, curious, innovative, sentient humans for maybe 50,000 of those years. The dinosaurs fucking ruled this planet for 260 million years, and we've been here less than a million and are about to self-destruct because we have a giant hard-on for fossil fuels. We need to get OVER our tiny selves.

The more diverse we are, the stronger we are. The more room there is for people to express their humanity, the better we are. The more accepting we are of what makes others strong, the stronger we all are. We are one. We are one. We are one. All these little things that divide us are the same things that could enrich us. Who cares who loves who? What does it matter? Good old what'isname . . . you know, the beard, the robe, sandals, got nailed to a tree for saying we should be nice to each other . . .? Yeah, that dude. He said "Love one another." I don't think he put any qualifiers on that. Love one another. No matter what. That's all.

Orenda rocking the National Women's Music Festival in Wisconsin, June 28, 2014