Susan Sontag, blogger manquée.

I’m fascinated by Susan Sontag’s journals (and not just because she was a big ol’ dyke). Her thoughts resonate for writers, er, bloggers decades later: "In the journal [read: blog] I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself...One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people." Spoken like a true blogger, a woman ahead of her time.

She also said "Nothing prevents me from being a writer except laziness." Susan Sontag, intellectual eminence – lazy? Now I don’t feel quite so guilty about staying home sick two days in a row and barely getting any real work done. And like many a Hollywood writer, she suffered from self-doubt: "With a little ego-building – such as the fait accompli this journal provides – I shall win through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said." I think all bloggers (even the avowed narcissists) can relate.

She believed in taking lovers willy-nilly, but she suffered from romance: "Poor little ego, how did you feel today? Not very well, I fear – rather bruised, sore, traumatized. Hot waves of shame, and all that. I never had any illusion that she was in love with me, but I did assume she liked me." Ouch! Veterans of the LA dating scene feel your pain.

She was conflicted about being gay: "My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me." One hopes that as she matured intellectually and sexually, she learned to embrace her fierce 'mo self.

She conflated writing with sex: "The orgasm focuses. I lust to write. The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation but, more, the birth of my ego...The only kind of writer I could be is the kind who exposes himself. I write to define myself – an act of self-creation – part of process of becoming – in a dialogue with myself, with writers I admire living and dead, with ideal readers." If only she'd lived long enough to discover the dialogue of the blog.

I am reminded of Twyla Tharp’s fabulous book The Creative Habit, in which she argues that creativity is not so much about the divine spark, but the dogged daily practice of one's work. Once a wonderful poet I gave a reading with, when asked how she coped with the inevitable dull, even blocked periods between flashes of inspiration, said that she believed in two things: the muse and the mule.

One of my favorite ways of preparing for creativity is to play the piano – but I gave up my piano when I moved to this new apartment. Instead I play FreeCell on my computer. Immersion in that mindless game allows for the most extraordinary thought processes.

Now back to writing the outline for my The Closer spec. I don’t like writing outlines, but it must be done. Twyla Tharp talks about the importance of making a plan, then letting it go: "once the shell is in place and you start work on the interior, the scaffolding disappears."

Massively genius.

On Sunday I took Charming Girlfriend to see Massive Attack at the Hollywood Bowl. The opening band sucked (really – who let them onstage?) but Massive Attack put on a brilliant show, even though one of the frontmen was away on paternity leave. They played most of my favorite songs and rawked the Bowl as it has never been rawked.

At one point they introduced an unbilled guest artist with, simply, “Her name is Elizabeth,” and out drifted Elizabeth Fraser, in a Yohji Yamamoto-like muumuu. “Elizabeth Fraser!” I squawked to Fetching Girlfriend. A legend in her own time, the doyenne of a hundred bands that modeled their sound on the Cocteau Twins. I thought back to my college days in Paris, endlessly riding the Métro and walking the streets with my (pre-iPod) Walkman’s headphones blasting the Cocteau Twins into my eardrums, my inner landscape profoundly coloring the outer one.

The only possible improvement to Sunday’s show would have been a guest appearance by Tracey Thorn, singing her songs from Protection. It was the best concert I’ve seen in LA since Dead Can Dance last year, also at the Bowl (though Hilary Hahn playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, an entirely different kind of genius, deserves special mention).

It’s time for an intervention.

This self-expression craze is spinning dangerously out of control. Parents are bestowing names upon their defenseless offspring in reckless defiance of the Name Police, aka Down with Insane Monikers (DIM). How else to explain such infractions as Female, Usnavy, Flushette, Pink January, Morronica (Morronica?!) and Larvell?

Oh yes. These are all real names, not urban legends. Speaking of urban legends, there really was an Ima Hogg (but she did NOT have a sister named Ura). And a college friend of mine swore he knew a girl named Smegma Bengwater. Smegma, are you out there?

As a dedicated culture maven, I have observed several trends in modern baby-naming. One popular ploy is to use Real Live Words, Kleverly Disguised: Sincer Lee, Eunik (Unique or Eunuch? Risky!), Pherever, Ideaz’, Silouette, Au’nesty, Ph’Ness, Wispur, and Mizarey (if you think you’re miserable now, kid, just wait till elementary school).

Then there are the names that are Just Plain Kre8tiv: Wahkeenyah-Wastedaka Windblow, Ni'Treasure O'moria, A'Vri-Seanae McKnz, Vyctoryan, and Kwincee.

Some names reveal Too Much Information about the mother’s postnatal state of mind: Acidalia, Amnastie, Mona Pain, Joy Anguish, Naughtia, and Shunasti. (“Meet the twins – she’s Shunasti, but she’s Naughtia.”)

Some lazy parents simply resort to adjectives: Clever, Tuff, Fancy, Righteous, Handsome, Notorious, and Furious. (But please, not all at once!)

Then there are the names that mean just what they say: Lumber, Squirrel, Brick, Soda, and Chalk. Nothing like the direct approach, I guess. Also in this group are Opera, Cicada, Michelob, Nazarene Savage, Summer Jelly, and Texas Casanova.

Again, I remind you that these are ALL REAL NAMES.

And finally, there are the parents for whom Baby Mozart CDs are not enough; no, their kids are destined to have Supernatural Powers: Almighty Rab, Supreme Infinite, Supreme Knowledge, Czarina, Kingdom Heave'n, Eumajesty, and, as evidence that Great Minds Think Alike, YorMajesti (whose sibling, to forestall any unseemly rivalry, is known as Yorhynace).

Difficult as it is to choose a favorite from these gems, I’d have to say that I’m partial to Female – so unambiguous, so breathtaking in its simplicity. So helpful, too, if you have a son named Male – they go together like salt and pepper shakers. If you’re unlucky enough to have a second daughter, you could call her Female Too (Female 2 for short). I also think that Morronica, Lumber, and Michelob trip musically from the tongue when yelled from the porch at the end of the day.

But really, when it comes to my kids, I look forward to hollering “Supreme Infinite! YorMajesti! Get in here and wash these dishes!”

Wherefore art thou, Baby Suri?

Some might say that a 22-page spread in Vanity Fair ought to sate the Suri-curious for another four or five months, but “some” are not celebrity-infant-obsessed. I need, nay, I crave more Suri! And I know I’m not alone. I need more pictures, more opportunities to study those suspiciously non-Cruise-like eyelids, to decipher their subtle Morse-code messages of hope or despair for humankind. More chances to ponder the timeless question: wig or toupee?

But in the interim, I thought I would try and track down the even-more-elusive and as-yet-unphotographed Baby Uri, Suri’s conjoined twin, who, it has been darkly rumored, has been whisked away to be raised by a grim phalanx of Scientology wet-nurses. Poor, giant, concave-skulled Uri – Suri got the brain, and he was left with the brawn.

Though the Uri search-and-rescue mission has so far been fruitless, I did uncover evidence of a scandal of even greater proportions. I’m here to tell you that not two, not four, not even six, but seven infants resulted from the nefarious Cruise/Holmes offspring-spawning contract, I mean union of hearts and souls. Yes, Suri is a septuplet. Why was she alone selected to assume the tiny sparkly Scientology-scion coronet? Sadly, when we examine the other hatchlings, it becomes all too obvious:

1) First, the aforementioned Baby Uri, rejected for his giantism, flat head and Russian accent.
2) Baby Murray, cast off because of his faux-croc briefcase stuffed with Brooke Shields depositions. He knew too much.
3) Baby Curry. Wrong ethnicity. Way wrong. Blame the Scientology lab techs for this one.
4) Baby Blurri. Faster than a speeding Thetan. Wouldn’t sit still for the photo shoot.
5) Baby Surly. Unattractive perpetual frown. Wouldn’t smile for the birdie (doesn’t she know who Annie Leibovitz is?).
6) Baby Furri. Nuff said.

But there is still hope for Suri’s sub-par siblings. One day they will all be sent to summer camp, will they not? And they will trip over a canoe and collide with one another, and gaze upon each other’s strangely familiar countenances, and become sworn enemies, and cause a riot in the dining hall and be banished to the isolation cabin, and in a thunderstorm will come to realize that they were all born, er, hatched on the same day. And in classic Parent Trap fashion, they will all switch places after camp, resulting in hilarious mistaken-identity hijinks, until in an emotional climax they will all be reunited in the circle of TomKat’s arms.

Before I quit the subject of cruelly withheld celebrity infant photos, I must express my fond hopes for another sighting of The Chosen One. Where, oh where is Shiloh?

Fields of Gold.

One of the perks of working at a major studio/global cultural steamroller is getting to sit in a fake studio audience to see a very real performance by Sting, for an upcoming episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. (I saw the pilot at a special on-lot screening this week hosted by the creators, and it was pretty good, except for the hopelessly miscast Amanda Peet. She’s supposed to be portraying a tough-as-nails, smarter-than-thou network savior, but the chronic lips-parted, doe-in-headlights half-smile is not working for me. There are surely many kick-ass actresses who can believably convey both hotness and fierce intelligence. Why, oh why?)

Anyway, they say that show business is all about hurry-up-and-wait, and today was no different. Two hours after our call time, we were still milling around the craft services table, debating the relative merits of Rice Krispy treats and cold breakfast sandwiches. Finally we were herded into our seats (that’s me in the second row) while the cameramen (why are they always men? I would say camerapeople, but really, they’re always men) discussed shots and lighting. Aaron Sorkin, prodigal showrunner, mingled regally, contentedly pondering the vicissitudes of power in Hollywood.

Sting loitered behind the stage, fingering his lute (yes, lute). Lauren Graham (perhaps better known as Lorelai Gilmore), sporting a clingy little black dress, daring cleavage and flip-flops, introduced him and he took the stage with a fellow lutist.

What can I say about Sting? He’s a sexy blond Leprechaun. He’s tan and lithe and he did yoga-contortionist moves to stretch his leg, while helpless thoughts of “Tantric Sex! Tantric Sex With Trudie Styler!" danced through my head. Then I remembered that The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” was the very first music video I ever saw. For a cultural icon, Sting was relaxed and gracious. Watching him noodle away on his lute, singing softly to himself, it struck me that he is a musician first and a personage second, that rare and lucky creature completely at one with his work. (You may imagine, gentle reader, my turbulent emotions upon returning to my corporate workplace afterward.)

Then Sting and his troubadour (who hid his face behind his lute and caressed it with his bowl-cut hair – so that’s what troubadours do) tenderly sang “Fields of Gold” a couple of times. We listened, spellbound, to this moving song about fleeting youth and a love that lasts for many years. Though ostensibly about a man and a woman, it transcends gender as all good love songs do, speaking equally to everyone who has invested hopes and dreams in another mortal. All the while, the massive tapestries behind them rippled gently in the smoke from the smoke machine.

Brangelina & Kissing Bobbies!

Went to the Silverlake/Los Feliz/Echo Park Artcrawl last weekend. What’s not to like about looking at art (some of it pretty decent), mingling with hipsters, eavesdropping on Intense Conversations among hipsters, meeting new hipster friends, free wine (although one cheapskate gallery actually served Two-Buck Chuck – shame!) and jaywalking across Sunset at sunset? The after-party at the Echo wasn't bad either.

Meanwhile, further downtown, über-hipster "art terrorist" Banksy's warehouse installation was a hipster/celebrity magnet. Even Brangelina showed up! O, Brangelina, whither thou goest, I will go.

Some wacky animal-rights protesters forced the "art renegade" (except how renegade are you when Brad and Angie grace your supposedly underground exhibit?) to scrub the paint off the live elephant (a 38-year-old female named Tai) that Banksy was pimping to make a heavy-handed point about the "elephant in the room," namely world poverty and injustice.

Despite the media circus (ouch), I've been a fan of good street art since I lived in Paris lo those many years ago, where street stenciling is a respected, if still subversive art form. Later I participated in lots of gleefully illicit stenciling and wheatpasting with assorted queer activist groups (hmmm...where are those photos?).

Banksy on Palestine and Israel: "The security barrier separating the occupied territories from Israel is over 450 miles long and 38 feet high."

The Berlin Wall was only 96 miles long and 12 feet high.

Even the Great Wall of China is only 26 feet high (but, okay, in its heyday it was more than 3,500 miles long – longer than the distance between New York and Paris!). My friend Mark and I tried to find this out at our favorite all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet (sesame balls! crab legs!), where a giant glossy mural of the Wall snakes above the vinyl booths. No one could tell us. Well, now we know.

Green power and gas prices.

A long weekend away from the internet (blame windstorms in Desert Hot Springs, hereafter known as Desperate Hot Springs, according to the gay desert mafia) has acquainted me with the growing phenomenon known as Blogger's Guilt.

As I drive to visit Lovely Girlfriend in said DHS, the windmills start sprouting out of the desert, marching in rows, tall and gangly, skeletal, bleached, like a waving field of crosses against the sunset. Phalanxes of windmills, benign or menacing, I can’t decide – proud green alternative to fossil fuels, or aliens straight out of a B movie?

MadLibs quiz: A) California’s windmills provide enough non-polluting energy to power [name of city]. B) Although we lead other states in renewable energy development, we lag behind countries like Germany and [name of nation], which leads the world in solar power. C) The U.S., of course, refuses to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to [increase/decrease?] global warming by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Many American states and cities, however, do participate in Kyoto-like emissions reduction programs. Including Los Angeles. Um, right.

Speaking of emissions, I was getting all excited about the falling price of gas, until Charming Girlfriend, ever the conspiracy theorist, reminded me of the nefarious relationship between lower gas prices and the upcoming midterm elections. D’oh!

(She’s so smart. And pretty.)

Answers:
A) San Francisco.
B) Japan. Japan! Who knew?
C) Made you look.

Gaily Forward!

It's happened to all of us: you're being a delightful, helpful backseat driver and the real, road-ragey driver is freaking out about whether to turn left or go straight at the next intersection, and you need a handy phrase that doesn't send you self-hatingly back in the closet and simultaneously stall the progress of civil rights. I give you "Gaily Forward!"

It is the universal Lesbian-Approved (and for all I know, Daddy/Bear/Twink-approved) alternative to the ever-so-slightly soul-bruising "Go Straight."

So next time your mother/husband/Republican coworker is dithering about which direction to take after the light changes, you'll be ready.

All together now: Gaily Forward!

Bed-In for Peace.

Yes, John and Yoko actually staged a "Bed-In" for peace. I swear the handmade sign above their heads reads "Hair Peace." Those crazy kids! Wielding the brave, absurd flame of love (and sex – come on, those were some sexy hippies) against another senseless, increasingly unpopular war. That was before the ACT UP era of die-ins, when angry queers made headlines by staging mass street funerals and chaining ourselves to the White House gates to protest Bush père's murderous inaction on AIDS.

Shrub's (read: the President-select's) administration is spending $8 billion a month on the war – I mean "democracy-building mission" – in Iraq (including those sweet no-bid Halliburton "reconstruction" contracts). That's $2 billion a week, $267 million per day, $11 million every hour.

Every hour. Let's think for a minute about how many college educations, affordable homes, diapers, library books, life-saving medical prescriptions, acres of protected rainforest, urban parks, and public school music teachers that would cover. (Just call me Bleeding Heart, baby.)

Where are today's moral giants? In these terrifying times, we could use a few more celebrities taking to their beds.

Unsolicited rave.

I’m listening obsessively, I mean OBSESSIVELY, to this song called Have You Heard Them Talking by Carrie Clark and the Lonesome Lovers. Carrie is a friend of my brother’s and apparently I met her at his wedding, though all those new faces are mostly a blur, obscured by my overarching memory of the Greatest Freeform Frisbee Game Of All Time. We must’ve had six frisbees, plus a soccer ball and a football at various points, and about twenty players, on this huge lawn by a lake. It went on for hours. But anyway, what I do know about Carrie is that she writes amazing country/blues songs, and I can't get over the twanging guitar and her haunting voice in this achingly bittersweet song about (as far as I can tell) miners who with their backbreaking labor are “no longer part of this time, no longer part of this daydream.” It lilts along in ¾ time and I can just picture the smoky dance hall and the couples waltzing in their cowboy boots.

I’ve tried to stop playing this song – I’m afraid of that thing that happens when you over-play a piece of music: eventually you achieve Song Overload and the song must be retired for a respectable period of time until you happen to hear it again a year later, and then you remember with excruciating clarity what it felt like to be living your life at that time. The only other thing that grabs hold of memory and emotion like music is the sense of smell: my mother, young and glamorous, wearing White Shoulders, leaning in to kiss me goodnight before going out with my dad. The dust and oil paint and turpentine of the arts center where I went to college, socking me in the solar plexus when I go back to visit. The heady mix of perfume and leather seats in an ex-lover's Mercedes.

Other songs that have had this hold on me: These Girls by Rachael Yamagata, Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack, the Eurythmics' For the Love of Big Brother, New Year's Prayer by Jeff Buckley...the list goes on.

79°

Every day on my way to work I drive over the LA River, that pathetic ribbon snaking through its narrow, shallow concrete channel. Hemmed in, graffitied, emasculated, helpless to determine its own course, yet bravely reflecting the glitter of the Pacific, just a few impassable strip malls away.

I can't adequately express my relief that is is 79° outside, not 103°. The oppressive heat of the LA summer saps my energy and motivation. Everyone said it would be better when I moved to Hollywood from the Valley, and maybe it is – marginally – but I work at a studio in Burbank, where venturing outside the air-conditioned building means instant suffocation, and even with my AC blasting at home these last few months, I couldn't sleep, and it was too hot and bright already at 7 a.m. to run with my dog in the hills. Next summer I swear I'm getting a place at the beach, a pied-à-plage.

I love the creative serendipity that happens when I start getting into writing mode: suddenly my ears are pricked for snatches of dialogue, relevant stories jump out at me from the news, seemingly random ideas connect in unpredictable ways. Today my therapist uttered a line that is perfect for my new The Closer spec script. To his amusement, I wrote it down – I've learned that if I don't jot stuff down immediately, it's lost. I hate waking up the next morning and wondering what I thought was so brilliant. I got a tiny little voice recorder and I do use it sometimes, but mostly I still scribble near-illegible notes on whatever scrap of paper happens to be lying around. Oh, the mountain of paper on my writing desk!

So in addition to my essays and poems and now this blog, I have my Closer spec to write, and my pilot and feature scripts to overhaul before the end of the year (self-imposed deadlines: not as effective as externally imposed ones, but better than no deadlines at all). The better to prepare for next staffing season.

I drove back from therapy through the hills under the Hollywood sign, that beautiful near-Mediterranean vista with its sage and yucca and storybook villas, slowing as I passed the Hollywood reservoir with my windows open and the sound of dry leaves skittering and the barest hint of an LA autumn in the air.

Full moon over Hollywood.

Driving home to Hollywood from Topanga, I'm startled by the rising moon over the 101: yellow, bloated and pendulous like an overripe grapefruit; a mottled, blotchy, lopsided water balloon; a paunchy, pockmarked, leering uncle hovering ominous on the horizon.

Movin' on up.

I hear that the city is spending a lot of money to gentrify my neighborhood. Every week there are new restaurants (Hungry Cat – try the heirloom tomato/watermelon salad!), clubs (Les Deux is back!), new throngs of club kids (Lindsay Lohan drinking bottled water at Hyde!), and nowhere to park.

Last month when my building was being retrofitted for earthquakes, the workmen kept parking their trucks in the driveway. Hey, I’m paying for that parking space in the back. “You can’t park there,” I said. “But there’s no parking in the street,” the foreman complained. “You can’t block the driveway,” I insisted. He threw me a surly look and went to move his truck.

Hollywood is still a barrio bordered by prettified Larchmont and picturesque Hancock Park, but we have the best farmers’ market in the city, and the sweat and stink and smog evaporate in the pines and eucalyptus of the hills, where red-tailed hawks circle lazily on warm currents of air.

In Griffith Park this morning I saw a movement, three coyotes through the mist: scrawny, rangy critters fixing me with that wary, resigned, flitting stare before loping up the path I was going to take with my dog.

Tuesday morning, five years ago.

Everyone remembers where they were. I’ll never forget my friend Mark’s phone call, rousing me from a dazed sleep with the surreal cry, “We’re under attack!” Running to turn on the TV. Watching in real time as the second plane hit. The shock and terror and grief, the chills and pride as we learned of the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93.

I stayed home that day. I was working at a major studio – a factory assembly line, you might say, for the global creep of Western culture – that, sure enough, ended up on the FBI’s list of targets receiving credible terrorist threats. I went to the Japanese teahouse in the park and fell on my knees in the grass in tears, asking god aloud how we and our beautiful planet could survive the hatred and brutish stupidity and avarice, the cycle of violence and vengeance, the world’s blind howl of suffering. I thought about the power and the absolute necessity of art to remind us of humanity’s highest strivings. I added a quote from Leonard Bernstein to my email signature: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

It was the beginning of the heated bumper sticker debate that waged across the nation. You could frame it, broadly, as red state vs. blue: on one side, “God Bless America,” “Power of Pride” and the Stars and Stripes waving in dizzying profusion. On the other, fewer but brave, “Peace is Patriotic,” “War Is Not the Answer,” and a peace sign superimposed on the earth. “Why do they hate us?” everyone wanted to know. “Because of our freedoms” was the disgracefully trite answer lobbed as a smokescreen for the poverty, inequity and despair in so much of the world, fueling fundamentalism and colliding inevitably with the arrogant fist of imperialism.

September 11th burst our protective bubble. It forced us all to contemplate bewildering questions of evil, safety and security, injustice and ignorance, what it’s like to live in fear, the double-edged sword of free will, the atrocities committed in the name of religion, the challenge of choosing compassion and forgiveness, the incredible gift and responsibility of our lives on earth. I wish I felt like things were better, five years on.

Hollywood Babel.

When I lived in the Burbank foothills, I used to stare from my writing desk through the windows to the mountains – sometimes a green bulk, sometimes shrouded in mist. Here the view from my desk is of a wall. I wonder if this lack of a tranquil vista blocks my creative feng shui. But far more detrimental to my creative progress is the noise of Hollywood.

The poodle upstairs yaps incessantly, as shrill as if he were in my own apartment. Add the bass woof of the boxer and the clicking thud of their paws as they run back and forth, back and forth overhead; the treble shrieks of the kids next door; the sharp voices of their parents: I’d never sleep in Hollywood if it weren’t for my ear plugs.

I recently came home early from work, sick and spent from a week of coughing, and dropped off from sheer exhaustion. Then, waking at the noise, I had to stuff my ears. It’s not the quiet Valley neighborhood I’m used to. The next-door neighbors fight, the upstairs neighbors argue, and when they’re not arguing, they laugh drunkenly till all hours. Helicopters throb overhead – I mean directly overhead, shining a spotlight on the friendly gangstas next door. Horns honk to the tune of “La Cucaracha” till I want to slit my wrists. Music blares at all-day, all-night shindigs. I had to call the cops to complain about a children’s birthday party – it was midnight and they’d been going strong for ten hours. I was tempted to run over and jump in the bouncy palace – I bet that would've scared those shrill little f**kers straight.

It’s Suri Holmes, people!

Last I checked, Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise are not married. That makes Suri a Holmes, not a Cruise. It drives me crazy that the media have slavishly, knee-jerkily kowtowed to this, dare I say, patriarchal construct – the one that some prominent postmodern theorist (Lacan? Limbaugh?) dubs the “Name of the Father” – which implies that women and children are, after all the pretty bouquets have been tossed, mere chattel. Y’know, property. Oh god, I hear you thinking, I thought this post was about adorable, reclusive little Baby Suri or maybe Pontifica's celebrity obsession, but it's turning into some crazy rant about the patriarchy. Yes, people, I’m ranting about the patriarchy! Booya!

(She is pretty cute, huh? Just look at that hair.)

Father = pater = patriarchy = male dominance in surnames. I’ll grant that when and if TomKat actually ties the (oh-so-bearded) knot, Katie – I’m sorry, Kate – will take her hubby’s last name, and because a woman giving her child her own last name is so not done in Hollywood, much less anywhere else in this post-feminist landscape, Suri will officially, legally become a Cruise.

Why does this happen, you ask, this wholesale feminine shedding of names? Partly because, historically, it’s been important for a man to establish that he, and not some cryogenically preserved Scientology founder, is the real father of his hired consort’s – I mean ladyfriend’s – child. Friend Lacan would add that it’s because the woman lacks a phallus – not a real phallus, you understand, but a symbolic one. Oh jeez, there’s a reason I dropped out of grad school.

My friend Emily, that dazzling iconoclast, defiantly gave her son her own last name even though she was married – and even though her daughter carries her father’s last name. But won’t it be confusing once they’re in school? asked well-meaning passers-by. Who the hell cares? was her tart reply. Love her.

Anyway. It’s all part and parcel of this return to traditionalism (some might call it a backlash) that has young women taking their husbands’ names. I always gently ask my soon-to-be-married straight friends why she won’t be keeping her own name – or why he won’t be taking hers – or why they won’t (both) be hyphenating. You know exactly the kind of blank stare I get. Then the women get sheepish or defensive, as if they secretly know what I’m talking about, but they’re just not willing to blaze that particular trail. It’s romantic to take his name, they protest. Somehow it’s not so romantic for him to take hers, unless they’re wacky outsider hippie artists. It creates a family unit – it’s easier on the children – blah blah blah. Let’s just admit it – feminism is still stigmatized and misunderstood. Anyone bold or foolish enough to claim the feminist mantle is still a man-hater, a lesbian, a bra-burner (though it’s been well-established, gentle reader, that no bras actually ever got burned).

Aw hell, what’s so bad about it, after all? Women aren’t really second-class citizens anymore, right? Don’t you fret, adorable little Suri of the suspiciously Thetan-looking eyes. It’s just tradition.

Swoon.

I read today that Brad Pitt refuses to marry Angelina until everyone who wants to has the right to marry. That means queers, which means me – and my girlfriend. I’ve always wished that more of my hetero friends and loved ones would take this principled stand when it comes to the privilege of matrimony. Sure, a straight wedding is a happy event, and I was thrilled when my brother recently embarked on this commitment with his wonderful longtime girlfriend. Yet too often, I think, straight people’s embrace of marriage bespeaks at best a happy cluelessness about the legal rights denied to gay citizens, and at worst a smug, selfish conformity. I wanted my sister and brothers and friends, people who profess to care about equality and democracy – and me – to resist the hegemony in solidarity. Sadly, it’s all too rare.

That’s why Brad’s statement is so powerful, why my gay friend Mason and I sighed and fluttered our eyelashes at each other today when we heard the news. I’ve found it hard to resist Brad ever since he burned up the screen as a dangerous boy toy in Thelma and Louise (we'll tactfully avoid any mention of Troy), and lately, with his photogenic, humanitarian globetrotting at Angelina’s side, frolicking with their rescued rainbow brood, it’s hard to find fault. Now this: spokesmodel for tolerance and inclusion and civil rights. Dreamy.

Not only do my girlfriend and I want to get married, we want to do all those crazy, mainstream things like share a house and have kids. Everything’s a little more complicated since we don’t have the rights that married couples take for granted, but hey, we’re plucky. We’ll make it work. So far, where children are concerned, we’re still weighing our options, in all their bewildering variety: adoption (domestic or international? open or closed?), foster children, carrying my own baby, harvesting my eggs so my partner can carry my biological child. These last two require the participation of a third party, someone cool enough to take a back seat while lesbians raise his child, someone smart and good-looking and compassionate, a humanitarian, a…wait a second...

I bet Angie would be cool with it. She’s all “we are the world, we are the children,” right? So, Brad, how about it? Will you be our baby daddy?