It occurs to me that I haven’t written a real column in a long while, so I thought I would sit at the keyboard while my worry is still fresh.
I live in a town that is best known for its bigotry. This is the city that Mark Twain once wanted to live in if the end of the world came, because it would reach him twenty years late; it’s also the city that saw Larry Flynt prosecuted, Mapplethorpe censored, and the KKK and various neo-Nazi criminal groups gain the highest level of recruitment in the state, short of Lodi, Ohio (where the Grand Master of the KKK apparently lives). Many of the rich people who own the city (or at least the sports teams, the theatres, etc) have admitted to having Nazi sympathies…long after the fall of Germany in WWII.
I tell myself, There are places out there that are far more accepting of diversity, but to be honest I think that in America, they are limited to fruity college towns and to huge metropoli. Otherwise, how could George Bush have got as many votes as he did? The man’s as thick as a brick. The only reason he’s getting the votes of the people who live in “America’s heartland” is that he stands for “family values.”
I’m scared.
One of my friends just told me about a woman she knows who had to fight a custody battle just to keep her own children – because the state of Florida wanted to take them from her and put them in “healthy” fosterage. Why? One of her neighbors happened to buy a book about real vampires called Something In The Blood, and even though she used a pseudonym when interviewed and was discreet as hell, this oh so hypocritical neighbor (why are you reading about psychic vampires and blood drinkers if you condemn them, if you had to look in the “satanic” new age section to even find the damn book?) reported her to Children’s Services. Of course, Children’s Services decided that she was not a fit mother because she drank blood.
I’m scared.
Never mind that depending on where I live, if I have children, they can be taken away from me because I’m a sadomasochist, or because I’m queer and I don’t bother to hide it (I’ve never been good at hiding things). Even if I were a straight suburban mummie, with a minivan and a husband and three pairs of knickers underneath my Laura Ashley dress, I’d still be in trouble if it came out that I actually drink my husband’s blood. After all, when your own next door neighbor drinks blood, what is the world coming to?
I was hired today by a language school to teach adults English as a second language. It occurred to me that this is probably the closest I will ever come to teaching, unless I stay within the ivory tower at the “right sort” of college (Antioch, Oberlin, Hampshire, Reed, other hippie bastions where weirdness is normal). If I apply to a preschool to work with the little rugrats, or even a high school to teach English literature to teens who are afraid of Shakespeare and need me to make the Bard come alive for them, all the principal has to do is type my name into a Yahoo! search and it’ll come out that I’m a vampire, and run this vampire support group – and there goes the job, because I’m not a fit role model to work with children, not in a school that honours Family Values and has to worry about charges of corruption of minors.
Family values. Hmph. Whose family? Not mine…
Mistress