Aged to perfection - Brief Article

I've just been talking to my friends Catherine and Barbara, who went to one of the big bashes last month for HBO's If These Walls Could Talk 2. They were all excited about the glamour and the stars and the food and, of course, the free valet parking, though they had to skip the valet lest their ratty car blow their cover.

They thought it was sweet that Anne was holding hands with Ellen on the right and with Ellen's mom on the left. True, Sharon Stone had a husband in tow, but her speech about supporting lesbians was evidently adorable. "All the clitterati were there," Barbara testified. Yes, they were most impressed by Chloe Sevigny playing butch just when she was being Oscar-nominated for playing femme. (You mean all that '80s feminist talk about roles being fluid is actually true?)

Of course, this is all old news. So's the great ratings share the show got. I only bring it up now to talk about Vanessa Redgrave, who, alas, was not at the glitter events (evidently she was appearing in a play in London) but who has struck a blow for lesbian elders as defiant as any Palestinian solidarity of days gone by. Because it's time folks know that the lesbian nation is one of the few places--outside Asia--where elders get respect.

Ruth Ellis, star of Yvonne Welbon's sweet documentary, Living With Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100, comes into her own when she's discovered by Detroit's young lesbians and turns into a born-again party animal. In the heterosexual world women past a certain age are considered invisible or pathetic; only piles of money or marriage to the right man gets a woman of a certain age any notice there. Women's magazines are full of desperate articles on how to survive. Not us! It's enough just to be old and a lesbian and willing to talk about the past while lending some presence to the present. Ellis is a doll, with charm to burn. And living to 100 and counting is no mean achievement. But the love that's showered on her by young dykes is, above all, just because she exists, and they are thrilled to be able to claim and honor her.

Ellis comes to mind this Easter Sunday because it's the first anniversary of my dear friend Loretta Szeliga's death. She passed in the last year of the old century at the age of 86 after a life of adventure and commitment. She was an old commie, a rank-and-file organizer. She may have been married twice, but most of her old pals were dykes. She'd run with a crowd of them back in the '30s, a wild gang of girls who loved fun as much as she did. Loretta used to tell her dates to drop her off early; then she'd sneak out, meet up with the gang, and head to the party circuit. She remembered Moms Mabley hitting on her. And she told me that her friend Frankie was so butch, she'd pay a Harlem tailor to put fly fronts in her skirts. When I knew Loretta in the '80s, she never missed a gay pride march. And she loved Wigstock.

I always wondered why Loretta hadn't gone for girls herself, until she told me about her best friend in high school. They'd fooled around some. They were crazy about each other. Then the girl's mother decided that something was "funny" and forbade her daughter ever to see Loretta again. Distraught, the girl committed suicide. When Loretta showed up at the funeral, this mother claimed she'd killed her daughter and kicked her out. Funny, Loretta never fooled around with a woman again. But she always knew who the gay girls were and sought out their company and remained friends with them (and me) half a century later.

When I found out that Loretta was dying, I raced for a plane to make it to the hospital in time. She instructed me to bring a photo of my new girlfriend, whom she'd never met. "Good," she said, surveying the picture of my love. "You finally got it right." She gave me her blessing. She tricked us all into thinking she'd survive. "No scenes!" she said. The next day she died.

You see, I want monuments as much as anyone does. Loretta's death has left a big hole in my heart. So forgive me for wishing If These Walls Could Talk 2 had included a fourth story, one in which the Ellen and Sharon and Chloe and Michelle characters could discover Vanessa at their corner bar, introduce her to their friends, and start carpooling to get her out at night.

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