While the north celebrates the pagan harvest holiday of Samhain and the Day of the Dead, people in Southeast Asia gather for the Naga Fireball Festival along the Mekong River.
The festival centers on a mysterious phenomenon where hundreds, or even thousands, of glowing red fireballs rise from the water. These spheres vary in size and can reach heights of 100 meters before disappearing. It is an incredible occurrence that remains unexplained.
The Mekong River separates Thailand from Laos, and locals believe the river is home to the Naga, a mythical creature and higher being. The Naga protects the river and the rural communities along its shores. Every year, near the end of the Buddhist Rains Retreat, these fireballs—ranging from small sparkles to large spheres of fire—burst from the water and soar into the sky. Also known as the Mekong lights, the phenomenon is viewed by locals as the Naga’s blessing.
The fireballs typically appear on the night of Wan Ok Phansa at the end of Vassa in late October. These sightings have been reported over a 250 km (160 mi) stretch of the Mekong, centered around Phon Phisai. While primarily associated with the river, fireballs have also been seen rising from smaller lakes and ponds in the region. This light phenomenon is hundreds of years old and is the centerpiece of the Phayanak Festival. Part of me hopes a scientific explanation is never found.
We Celebrate Día de los Muertos
Poster for the museum’s Day of the Dead exhibition
Here in Sonoma County, we celebrate Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) with marigolds (cempasúchil) and ofrendas (home altars), and with public celebrations held in every city. We recently visited the Museum of Sonoma County’s 30th Annual Día de Muertos exhibition, which features altars and artwork created by hundreds of students, artists, altaristas, and community members. The exhibition runs until November 29.
Also at the museum until November 8 is an exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s monumental Running Fence. This temporary art installation stretched 24.5 miles through Sonoma and Marin Counties and became a world-famous, iconic part of North Bay culture and history.
Photo: Museum of Sonoma County
My wife Holly grew up in Santa Rosa and remembers visiting the Running Fence with her family. While her mother was among those who thought the project was silly, Holly found it pretty cool as a high schooler. Now, it seems everyone agrees it was cool.
Audie Murphy’s relationship with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) reveals a complex intersection of patriotism, celebrity, and the political paranoia of the Cold War. Murphy’s resistance to the climate of fear created by HUAC highlights a principled stand against the infringement of civil liberties and the weaponization of patriotism.
The House Un-American Activities Committee was a congressional committee formed in 1938 to investigate subversive activities within the United States. While its initial focus was on Nazi and fascist influence, its focus shifted sharply after WWII toward the perceived threat of communism. By the late 1940s and 1950s, HUAC had become a tool for political persecution, utilizing public hearings to “out” suspected communists. The committee operated on a system of coercion; witnesses were often pressured to “name names”—to identify colleagues, friends, or family members with socialist or communist leanings—in exchange for their own professional survival. Those who refused to cooperate were often cited for contempt of Congress or, more commonly in Hollywood, were placed on “blacklists,” effectively ending their careers.
From the book Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist by Thomas Doherty
Audie Murphy’s involvement with the anti-HUAC sentiment was less about an ideological alignment with the left and more about a visceral reaction to the committee’s tactics. Murphy, who had faced the horrors of war and seen the true meaning of sacrifice, found the committee’s methods of intimidation and betrayal abhorrent. For Murphy, the demand that citizens betray one another to prove their loyalty was fundamentally un-American. He viewed the HUAC hearings not as a defense of democracy, but as an attack on the very freedom of association and thought that he had fought to protect in Europe.
Murphy’s stance was particularly potent because he was “untouchable” by the committee. As a national hero with a chest full of medals, including the Medal of Honor, he could not be easily painted as a “Red” or a subversive. This gave him a unique platform to criticize the committee without the immediate fear of professional ruin that haunted his peers.
Murphy was not alone in his opposition, though the risks for others were far higher. The most famous instance of resistance occurred in 1947 with the “Hollywood Ten,” a group of screenwriters and directors who refused to answer HUAC’s questions on First Amendment grounds. They were imprisoned for contempt, and their names became synonymous with the blacklist. Other stars took different paths of resistance. Paul Robeson, a world-renowned singer and actor, became a primary target of the committee due to his outspoken socialist views and his refusal to renounce them, leading to a systemic erasure of his career in the United States.
Audie Murphy testifies
The First Amendment Committee made a radio program to defend the First Amendment and critique HUAC–Hollywood fights back. Forty-five stars, directors, screenwriters and four U.S. senators spoke.
Audie Murphy said:
“You know during the war every guy in uniform dreamed of the day when he could stop squeezing triggers and come home. You get so fed up on fighting that you never want to do it again. There’s one kind of fighting that has to go on always. You can’t ever take a furlough from this fight to preserve human liberty. I think the methods used by the Thomas Rankin committee are a challenge to those liberties and I think we should use every fair and constitutional means to fight those methods.” (HUAC was also called the Thomas Rankin committee).
In the broader context of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Audie Murphy’s opposition to HUAC serves as a reminder that the defense of civil liberties is not the exclusive domain of any one political party. Murphy’s resistance was rooted in a soldier’s code of honor and a citizen’s demand for privacy. By challenging the committee, he demonstrated that true patriotism consists not of blind obedience or the betrayal of others, but of the courage to protect the constitutional rights of all individuals, regardless of their political affiliations.
Murphy, in particular, embodied the principle that American heroes are defined not only by military valor but by the willingness to defend constitutional liberties. His opposition to HUAC showed that the most decorated soldier of World War II understood that the war’s true purpose—defending American freedom—required vigilance against threats to liberty even from within America’s own government.
Committee for the First Amendment Relaunched
Recently over 550 celebrities relaunched the Committee for the First Amendment. The current group is headlined by actor and activist Jane Fonda — whose father, actor Henry Fonda, was one of the early members.
Jane Fonda rallys fellow actors. Photo: msn.com
Their intent is to stand up in a defense of our constitutional rights: “The federal government is once again engaged in a coordinated campaign to silence critics in the government, the media, the judiciary, academia, and the entertainment industry.”
In a letter inviting her peers to join the re-established group, Fonda writes: “I’m 87 years old. I’ve seen war, repression, protest, and backlash. I’ve been celebrated, and I’ve been branded an enemy of the state. But I can tell you this: this is the most frightening moment of my life. When I feel scared, I look to history. I wish there were a secret playbook with all the answers — but there never has been. The only thing that has ever worked — time and time again — is solidarity: binding together, finding bravery in numbers too big to ignore, and standing up for one another.”
My sign for a counter protest at an anti-abortion rally
It all went well and then it didn’t.
We had met at college and we had lived together briefly at a hippie refuge near Washington State University. Paul had gone to high school with a couple of our other comrades who moved out of a WSU dorm together to form the counterculture household. Once I got out of the in loco parentis contract that only applied to female students, I moved in next door in 1969. Much dope was smoked and acid dropped. We focused as much on anti-war marches as studies. I joined the nascent feminist movement. My women’s liberation group helped female students get underground abortions and we worked to change the state law to make abortion legal in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade.
We were a collection of misfits and Paul was a misfit because he was very fat. He’s still large, but, since bypass surgery, not as obese as he was. Probably this was a defining trait in his life. Men we encountered would comment openly on his weight just as they are compelled to make rude judgments about women’s bodies. I felt protective of him.
After that, along with 12 other activists, I founded a collective house in town, but Paul did not follow us there. He had graduated and moved on to a teaching job elsewhere.
We reunited with college friends in 2011, 38 years later. Most had stayed in Washington State. I was the only one who’d moved to California. Paul lived and taught high school math in a small town in Washington.
More recently Paul and his wife Amanda contacted me asking to meet up in Santa Rosa. They were flying in for a wedding. Could we meet for lunch? Of course I agreed, thinking covid would surely be a thing of the past by the time we got together.
But covid did not comply. The surging pandemic boosted anxiety and my wife declined the lunch, but she greeted them politely and invited them to look around the house and garden.
We lunched at my favorite restaurant, a destination for out-of-town company. They are foodies, so that was a good choice.
We talked about old friends. I was glad to reminisce with someone who remembered them.
At a pro-abortion protest. Photos by author
After the wedding, they wanted to meet up again. I suggested Brew, the gay coffee and beer shop owned by dykes.
Paul and Amanda divulged that their heads were still in the ‘60s. I think they were talking about music, but I didn’t ask them to elaborate.
At this meeting I learned that they had met at a weight watchers meeting; both had worked and retired as teachers. When they told me they were practicing catholics and had raised their three kids as catholics, alarm bells went off in my head. Really? The catholic church is the enemy of women and gays. The catholic church wants to destroy me and everything I’ve been fighting for all my life. At WSU the women’s liberation group ran up against the catholic church while organizing for women’s reproductive rights.
I said all this. Not very articulately. How could you be a political radical and a catholic? But maybe Paul had never been a radical. He’d just lived with a bunch of radicals. Maybe for him the sixties were all about smoking dope.
Paul and Amanda were in town for another day and I suggested they drive to the ocean. You can’t visit Sonoma County and not see the spectacular Sonoma coast. Paul complained about driving and I suggested Amanda drive. No, he said.
Paul raised his voice to put off my expected protest. I imagined this was the voice he used on dissident tenth graders. “It’s a scientific proven fact, he said, that women have poorer directional sense than men and Amanda would get lost.”
To this statement I didn’t even respond. It seemed so bizarre and out of the blue, not a point worth arguing.
Amanda agreed that she has a terrible sense of direction and told a story to prove it. She went along with the program and maybe didn’t want to drive, although she said she did drive when she had to get somewhere.
“You could be the navigator,” I said. “You’ll be sitting right there riding shotgun. My wife and I share the driving and navigating.”
To this Paul just shook his head, as if he couldn’t even imagine allowing his wife to drive.
The last text Paul sent said, “We made it. A long way to Bodega Head. Stopped for water on the way.”
That was the last I ever heard from them.
Comebacks unsaid:
I have a very good sense of direction, probably better than yours. Let’s rumble.
Does remembering the sixties include remembering the feminist movement?
Did you tell tenth graders that women can’t drive?
Do you believe in women’s right to choose abortion?
Do you believe in women’s equality?
Do you think, as the catholic church does, that gay people are sick?
If you believe, as the catholic church does, that women are lesser beings and queers are sick, why did you want to get together with queer old feminist me?
Flo stays in touch with soldiers in occupied Germany
My Mother and Audie Murphy Chapter 122
In the spring of 1946, Flo had made it back home, but she remained connected to her friends in occupied Germany. One of them was a family friend from her hometown of Yakima, Major Dan Wickersham. In her album she posted a biographical sketch of him along with some pictures of others who stayed in the occupied zone.
According to the sketch, “Major Wickersham has been with the Third Division longer than any other officer now present, and he has some definite ideas about how the peace should be kept.
“The public cry of ‘send my boy home to me’ is so depleting the Occupation Forces that we will soon be hard pressed to carry out all the projects required to adequately secure and maintain the Army of Occupation,” the major says.
“A victory that cost so much must be adequately protected. However, I have complete confidence that the Occupation will be successful and with new replacements that will begin to come from the States in December, effective strength will be assured.
“The future? Well, I love the Army and have given it six of the best years of my life, but at times my wife and that apple orchard in Yakima, Washington, look mighty good to me.”
The American Occupation Force remained in Germany for a decade, until 1955. I don’t know when Maj. Wickersham was able to return to Yakima. In the meantime, Flo commiserated (and fished) with his wife, also named Florence.
The Flos–Wick and Wickersham
The first anniversary of the Southern France invasion was August 15, 1946.
My brother Don found this clipping from the Nevada State Journal, 1956. Dan Wickersham’s granddaughter told me he died in a fishing accident on the Columbia River in 1964.
Comrades in the Occupied Zone sent pictures
Col. John A. Heintges (Flo’s 1945 Xmas date who later became a general) and Lt. Col. Ralph Flynn, 7th Infantry Regiment (L), Lt. Leland Nelson, whose parents Flo visited in Walla Walla WA (R)
Regimental staff, 30th Infantry
Col. Lionel G. McGarr, Reg. commander 30th Infantry at a funeral in Paris
No one has ever praised me for my fashion sense. In the 60s and 70s it didn’t matter. Lesbians all wore pretty much the same thing–jeans and T shirts. I bought my flannel shirts at JC Penney in the boys’ department, boys size 18. I worked construction and so I could wear the same outfits for work and play. For lesbian dress up events I bought a used tuxedo. But straight affairs like weddings left me perplexed as I surveyed my closet.
I didn’t have a thing to wear.
By the 1980s I felt the need for something a little dressier. I enlisted my friend Joan and her tailor girlfriend Lucy to help me. They accompanied me to Macy’s in downtown San Francisco to buy what my father might describe as a sport coat. Something you would wear with slacks of a different color.
With my girlfriend Pat Cull, wearing the fuchsia jacket
One of the highlights of my week used to be looking through the Macy’s ad in the Sunday Chronicle. It wasn’t a catalog, more like a magazine, even bigger than the Sunday New York Times Magazine. There, in gorgeous color photographs, were all the things we desired–clothes, kitchen appliances, leather furniture, gadgets. You had to go to the Sears catalog for tools, and I drooled over those pictures too. My collective houses had little by way of possessions–furniture found on the street, 2X4 and plywood beds, brick and board bookcases, tables refashioned from electrical spools, mismatched kitchen utensils and dishes from Goodwill. We lusted after the new, even if we dared not admit it to our politically correct circle of friends.
Department stores both excited and overwhelmed me. I loved the window and in-store displays even more than the color pictures. Macy’s was the best, not so hoity toity that you felt unwelcome, but still very classy. Macy’s had signed me up for my very first credit card at a time when most credit cards were still restricted to men. I was as loyal as a customer with little money could be. But I was overwhelmed by the number of departments and choices. I invariably narrowed them down by only shopping the sale racks, usually in the far back of each department. In fact, I could never bring myself to pay full price for anything, so I usually never got beyond them.
Now it was time to use my credit card to buy something new. At Macy’s, Lucy steered me toward the Misses section and we each began perusing a different rack. Cutting edge fashion in the 80s featured big boxy jackets and oversized shirts with padded shoulders. I thought the style would look great on me. Lucy was the one who found the jacket, boxy and big, size 12. It was bright fuchsia. Should I buy it? Would it be a good wardrobe investment? Both women encouraged me. And, while Joan was a sister construction worker, Lucy was a clothes person. I took her advice.
My jacket was well received in San Francisco. I stood out in a crowd of colorful outfits, but I fit in. Fuchsia became my favorite color, and my color consultant, Lucy, said it best complemented my pink white girl complexion.
My travels as a tradeswoman organizer and author took me to New York several times in the 80s. I would stay with carpenter Barbara Trees who lived in a converted warehouse near the tip of Manhattan. The apartment took up part of a floor of the high-rise warehouse—one big room. Residents had filed suit when the owner sought to evict them. They won and were able to stay in the building. Remodeled plumbing necessitated climbing a couple of steps to get to the shower and toilet.
Carpenter Barbara Trees with a coworker
On my first trip to New York I was tasked with meeting with the Ms. Foundation to ask for funding for the tradeswoman organization I was working with. Barbara was out of town but she left a key and I stayed in her loft alone, so I had no one to ask for fashion advice. She was also a construction worker, so she may not have helped that much.
Fashion anxiety overtook me. What does a clueless West Coast dyke wear to a meeting in NYC? I didn’t know anyone in New York, but I had the phone number of the writer and activist Sarah Schulman. She put my mind at ease, advising me that all would be ok no matter what I wore.
The morning of my appointment I slipped on black shoes and slacks, then topped off the outfit with my fuchsia jacket. In Barbara’s mirror I looked fabulous. Locking the many locks on her door, I rode the elevator to the street and walked out into a sea of people on a sun shiny Manhattan day. Wall Street traders in black suits, ladies walking little dogs–everyone was wearing black. Suddenly it seemed like every single pair of eyes turned toward me and my fuchsia jacket. I began walking purposefully toward the subway and I got a couple of blocks before I had to turn around. I couldn’t do it. I went back to Barbara’s and changed into a black leather jacket I had worn on the plane.
We didn’t get the money. Would we have gotten it if I’d been able to wear the fuchsia jacket?
Epilogue
Barbara Trees was so traumatized by the 9-11 attack that she moved away from New York City. We lost touch after that.
Sarah Schulman joined the faculty of Northwestern University in Illinois in 2016. Her writing has centered on queer life and AIDS activism in NYC. Her latest book is The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. In search of activist guidance I actually bought her tome Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, written using interviews as part of the ACT UP Oral History Project.
He was a war hero—THE most decorated hero of World War Two—and that was his epithet, even as he became a Hollywood movie star with more than 40 movies to his credit.
What no one, and especially the US military, wanted to talk about was the degradation of his life because of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and, I would argue, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Audie Murphy survived the war but not his invisible injuries.
To understand Audie Murphy’s post-war life, I’ve created a timeline that will help me explore the details in future posts.
Audie Murphy Post-War Timeline
My mother Flo’s famous picture of Audie when he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in the field May 12, 1945
Flo sailed into New York City at the end of March 1946, and she partook of as much culture as she could in a few short days. She saved the playbills from several shows. She heard music at Carnegie Hall, saw the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the City Center of Music and Drama, and caught a play at the Cort on Broadway.
I love this ad! Flo was a career girl.Carnegie Hall lineup
She connected with a friend, Dr. Edward Dunlap, who was starting his medical practice at New York Hospital, and she included his announcement, a picture of the hospital, and a picture of him. He could have been someone she knew during the war, but there are no other pictures or mentions of him in the album.
Dr. Eddie, his announcement, and the New York Hospital on East 68th Street.
Did she see her lesbian girlfriend, Edna Lauterbach, while in New York? Probably, but there’s no mention of “Eddie.” They had seen a show together when Flo visited in 1941, so it’s likely they reconnected — or maybe their friendship had ended by this time. Edna was definitely smitten with Flo, and I can imagine that Flo may have felt uncomfortable in the situation. I wrote about their relationship after discovering love letters from Eddie saved in another scrapbook. https://mollymartin.blog/2016/09/03/my-mothers-lesbian-affair/
In Andean cultures, the feminine figure was valued as a living expression of Pachamama’s attributes. AI generated image
August 1 in the northern hemisphere is celebrated as Lammas, the first harvest day. In South America it is Pachamama Day, the start of the growing season.
I first encountered the idea more than fifty years ago, but I didn’t recognize its importance until much later.
While reading Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, I kept noticing one name in the footnotes: Alfred Crosby. The name stopped me. Crosby had taught history at my alma mater, Washington State University, and I had been his student.
At the time I knew him simply as a professor. I had no idea I was sitting in the classroom of a historian who would change the way the world understood history.
In 1972 Crosby published The Columbian Exchange, introducing a revolutionary way of thinking about European conquest. History, he argued, was not driven only by kings, generals, and battles. Plants, animals, microbes, and ecosystems were just as important. His work essentially created the field of environmental history.
The Columbian Exchange describes the enormous movement of crops, livestock, diseases, technologies, and cultures between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Potatoes, tomatoes, and corn transformed Europe, Africa, and Asia. Horses and cattle transformed the Americas. But the deadliest travelers were invisible.
In Ecological Imperialism, Crosby argued that European conquest depended as much on biology as on military power. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and other diseases swept through Indigenous populations that had no immunity. Entire societies were devastated before they could organize resistance. Europeans inherited landscapes emptied by epidemics as much as they conquered them by force.
Charles Mann takes the story even further. He argues that the Americas were home to far larger populations than historians once believed—perhaps tens of millions more. The continent Europeans imagined as a wilderness had actually been carefully managed for centuries by Indigenous peoples. Forests, fields, rivers, and grasslands all bore the imprint of human stewardship.
The tragedy becomes even greater in that light. Not only were millions of people lost; countless traditions, languages, and ways of understanding the natural world nearly disappeared with them.
Nearly—but not entirely.
Some traditions survived.
Every August 1, Indigenous communities across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina celebrate Pachamama Raymi, or Festival of Mother Earth, one of the oldest pre-Hispanic ceremonies still practiced in South America. Pachamama, from the Quechua words pacha (world, space, or time) and mama (mother), is often translated as Mother Earth. But she is more than the ground beneath our feet. She represents the living world that nourishes all life. Pachamama is the fertility goddess in Inca mythology, responsible for planting, harvesting, creating mountains and earthquakes, as well as the very existence of life on Earth.
The celebration coincides with the start of the agricultural season in the southern hemisphere and centers on a simple but profound idea: reciprocity.
The Earth feeds us. We must feed the Earth.
On August 1, farmers allow their fields to rest. Families prepare offerings of cooked foods, corn, potatoes, fruits, coca leaves, medicinal herbs, chicha, seeds, and flowers. A small hole is dug in the ground—symbolically Pachamama’s mouth—and the gifts are placed into the earth. The offering is not payment but gratitude, an acknowledgment that human life depends on the generosity of the land.
It is, in essence, Thanksgiving.
Long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, Andean peoples had developed a tradition that recognized what modern environmental science is only beginning to emphasize: humans are not separate from nature. We exist because of it.
The ritual feels remarkably relevant today. We celebrate technological progress while exhausting soils, warming the climate, polluting rivers, and treating the Earth as an endless warehouse of resources. Pachamama Day offers another way of thinking—not about ownership, but relationship; not about extraction, but reciprocity.
I find myself wishing we had something similar in our Western culture.
Our Thanksgiving has become centered on football, shopping, and overeating, with little reflection on the land that produces our food or on the Indigenous peoples who first cultivated many of the crops on our tables. Imagine setting aside a single day each year not to consume more, but to acknowledge our dependence on healthy soil, clean water, pollinating insects, and the astonishing web of life that makes our existence possible.
Perhaps that is why Crosby’s work and Pachamama Day seem connected to me.
Crosby taught that history cannot be understood without ecology. The Andean peoples never separated the two in the first place.
One explains how civilizations rose and fell. The other reminds us how to live.
As August 1 approaches, I think about the professor whose lectures made a great impression on me, the civilizations whose knowledge survived against overwhelming odds, and the simple wisdom embodied in a handful of food returned to the soil.
In Sweden, afternoon coffee is a daily ritual, and my grandmother Gerda carried the tradition with her to America. We often joined her at her tiny house in Yakima and later at her apartment in a senior housing complex across from the Presbyterian church.
As Grandma arranged homemade butter cookies on her little table and poured coffee into delicate cups, she reminisced about sailing into New York Harbor and seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time in 1905. She had been herded toward the line marked Aliens. The statue, rising above the harbor, filled her with emotion. Forty-four years later, after returning from a visit to Sweden, she saw it again. This time she joined the line marked American Citizens.
Flo on the deck of the USAT George Washington crossing the Atlantic
For Gerda, the Statue of Liberty symbolized America’s welcome to immigrants.
“I could only think, This time I’m a citizen,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.
My mother, Flo, sailed into New York Harbor in 1946 as she returned from Europe after the war. For her, the statue carried different memories. It reminded her of enormous loss—her fiancé and many friends had been killed—but also of pride. She and her generation had fought fascism and prevailed.
“When I saw the Statue of Liberty, I thought about all the people who died in that war,” Flo said. “The Americans were fighting for democracy.”
Ship dinner menu for March 25, 1946
Her face crumpled. A tear rolled down her cheek. Soon both my mother and grandmother were crying. To me, it seemed almost hysterical.
Flo loved history and liked to imagine the future.
“Maybe by the turn of the twenty-first century,” she sniffled, “war will be history.”
Lounging on deck. It took the Geo Washington about ten days to sail from France to NYC
Both women were unabashed patriots. Flo flew the American flag every Fourth of July, though by the early 1970s she had also become deeply troubled by America’s conduct in Vietnam. Gerda proudly displayed both the American flag and the blue-and-yellow Swedish flag in her home. She liked to say that she had voted in every election open to women since becoming a citizen.
I was not a flag waver. I was a flag burner—metaphorically. I never actually set fire to a flag, but my brother and I once cut up an American flag to sew a shirt. It was illegal then; today it might pass as a right-wing fashion statement. To me the flag represented a country whose foreign policy included overthrowing democratically elected governments, assassinating foreign leaders, and installing compliant dictators.
A musician entertains the crowd of GIs on deck
I had never seen my grandmother cry before, but I had often seen my mother cry, usually over war. During the Vietnam War she would call me in tears, saying her generation had failed to end war and now the responsibility belonged to mine. She carried the suffering of the world on her shoulders.
I vowed never to be like her. I wouldn’t cry. Crying was weakness—or so the culture taught me. Men didn’t cry, and men held the power. I wanted to be like them.
That afternoon, what struck me as sentimental nostalgia repelled me. I had never sailed into New York Harbor and never would. When I looked at the Statue of Liberty, I didn’t see freedom. I saw the thousands of Southeast Asians killed in a war my country was waging, the millions of tons of bombs dropped on civilians, villages burned, children scarred by napalm.
A finger points to the sign on shore reading “Welcome Home. Well Done.”
Years later, I began to wonder whether my mother’s extraordinary empathy exacted a physical toll. She was repeatedly hospitalized with severe asthma attacks. The disease eventually killed her at seventy.
Later still, I came to believe that Flo had probably returned from the war with what we now recognize as PTSD. The government had little interest in acknowledging psychological trauma, even among combat veterans, much less civilian war workers like my mother.
In NY harbor the Transportation Corps sign reads “Welcome Home.”
Like so many Boomers, I had grown up with a parent emotionally wounded by war.
At the time, though, I understood none of that.
All I felt was embarrassment at her tears.
The Statue of Liberty had meant hope to my grandmother, sacrifice to my mother, and hypocrisy to me. It took me a while to understand that all three meanings could be true at once.
Now, when I see the statue and read the Emma Lazarus poem, I’m the one who’s crying. I still cry for the people we kill in endless needless wars, for the immigrats we imprison, murder and deport, and I cry for our democracy and all that we have lost.
Photo by Tom Coe on UnsplashThe famous inscription mounted inside the statue
There might be a higher percentage of lesbians in Sonoma County, California, than anywhere else in the world. So, even though we’ve had gay pride parades and celebrations since the 1980s, it’s surprising that only this year did we have our very first dyke march.
Organizers say it was about time.
An estimated 600 people participated in the march and “Lez-a-Palooza Street Fair on the Square” in Santa Rosa, the county seat. Cries of “We’re here, we’re queer. Get used to it!” resounded in the city streets on June 21.
Movement Origins
Dyke marches began in 1993 in Washington, D.C., organized to confront lesbian invisibility and erasure within both the broader LGBTQ+ movement and society at large. Rejecting corporate sponsorship and respectability politics, dyke marches centered grassroots power, direct action, and community care. Built on a demand for visibility, justice, and collective strength, the movement quickly spread to cities including San Francisco and Chicago, becoming a powerful tradition of lesbian-led activism and celebration.
Organizers say the Sonoma County Dyke March proudly carries forward this legacy, uniting generations and creating powerful common ground across the queer community. A dyke march is not a parade. It’s a community-centered march focused on visibility, history, and connection. The Lez-a-Palooza street fair creates intentional space to uplift dykes, lesbians, queer, non-binary, and the sapphic and trans community, while standing in solidarity with the broader LGBTQIA2S+ community.
Organizer Pam Adinoff, 72, said, “As a lesbian who has been out in Sonoma County for 53 years, my identity has been really important to me, but I have felt more and more invisible over the years as an aging lesbian. We have a very, very large senior lesbian community and a lot of them showed up for (last year’s) Pride and they were all marching under different organizations. But nothing said the word ‘lesbian.'” So Adinoff, along with a number of like-minded women, decided to address that sense of invisibility.
Pat Andreine, one of the organizers, said the best thing about the march was that it was intergenerational. Along with her partner, the historian Tina Dungan, she staffed the Sonoma County LGBT history timeline booth. Pat said they had lots of interest from young people.
New buddies L and Chivvis
Radical Inclusion
It’s an event meant to both elevate and celebrate lesbian culture and history, organizers said. Crucial to its success and its mission are the people who span ages and identities who have been recruited to help get the first-ever event off the ground.
“In writing our mission statement, we met with different groups of people, trans, non-binary, ‘How does this mission statement sound? Is there anything we need to change and do you feel included and do you feel seen?'” Adinoff, of Petaluma, said. “Visibility is one of the only things that we all want, we are all so different. But we wanted to create a warm embrace in a time when our community is facing immense (threat).”
“Part of the intention of this march is to make a strong statement of protest because the queer community is very much under attack. Trans lives are being targeted, non-binary people, marriage equality, and we want to make a statement that what is happening in the country right now, aimed at the queer community, is not OK,” said organizer Nancy Kelly, 68.
Santa Rosa natives Bonnie Hogue and my wife, Holly Holbrook, agreed that it was revolutionary to be part of the first dyke march in their hometown. Holly said that, if when she was younger there had been this kind of lesbian visibility, she would have figured out her sexuality a lot sooner.
Holly (L) and Bonnie, Santa Rosa natives
Reclaiming the Word
And that word “dyke” was intentional, too. “The word ‘dyke’ definitely used to be a slur,” said Kelly. “One of the things that the gay and queer community does is … take a slur and put it on themselves and reclaim it. So dyke used to be a derogatory word, as did queer.”
Much work was done in the organizing coalition to open the event to all identities, organizers said. “…There was a term – TERF, trans exclusionary radical feminist – meaning only people that were born women can identify as women,” said Alicia LeCompte, 38, of Santa Rosa. LeCompte, who hosts regular queer kickball and climbing events, wasn’t interested in supporting an event that wasn’t welcoming to all women. “A lot of my friends who are non-binary were asking, ‘Are they going to be inclusive to all genders and all queer expressions?'” she said. “Are they the type of people that we want to collaborate with, are we on the same wavelength?”
The answer was Yes. The event’s motto: All identities, all orientations, one march.
Chaya and Judith with young friend
Bridging Generations
“It’s so energizing to be in an intergenerational community,” said organizer Frances Fuchs, 72, of Santa Rosa.
For Diana “D” Getko, 28, of Sebastopol, much can be learned from older women who have lived through, and learned from, fights for civil rights and acceptance. “I don’t think many people of our generation realize just how much the dykes have carried us through the formative years back in the ’70s,” she said. “Community is what got us through back in the ’70s and ’80s and we are going through another hard time. Community is what is going to get us through again.”
“It’s about building community,” Kelly said. “There is a part that is very serious and it’s a protest but part of it is just fun and joy. Both sustain us.”
The community has many challenges. In the opening days of his second term, President Donald Trump moved swiftly to target transgender and nonbinary people, limiting medical care, stating the federal government recognizes only two unchangeable sexes: female and male, denying requests for passports that use gender markers that don’t conform to the administration’s new definition. It all makes gathering in solidarity all the more important.
And love is at the heart of the event, organizers said. Allies and supporters are welcome. “People say ‘How can you call it a dyke march if it’s open to everybody?'” Fuchs said. “And basically we’d have to say the times are changed. We don’t need to put a fence around it to protect ourselves. We need to open it to protect ourselves. This is about bigger community and bigger connections and having a broader base to stand on.”
A participant in the drumming corps, Sistah Boom, which reunited for this eventOn the way to the march. Santa Rosa posted Pride banners downtown for the month of June
From the mission statement:
Sonoma County Dyke March is an inclusive, grassroots, intergenerational movement bringing together Lesbian, Queer, Transgender, Non-Binary, Sapphic people, the full LGBTQIA2S+ spectrum, and our allies to resist attacks on our rights, bodies, and lives.
We honor the legacy of the Lesbians and Queer women who have been the backbone of social justice movements. We uplift Elder Lesbians, reclaim the word Dyke as a symbol of pride and defiance, and bestow this legacy on the next generation.
We organize in a moment of immense and escalating backlash—against trans lives, queer rights, reproductive freedom, marriage equality, racial justice, our immigrant communities, and democracy itself. Our goal is to complement and strengthen Pride by offering an intergenerational inclusive space for visibility, celebration, and belonging.
Silence is not an option.
Too many have sacrificed too much for us to stand by while our rights erode.
Holly and I with old friends. My T-shirt reads This is What an Old Lesbian Looks Like
Thanks to reporter Kerry Benefield for quotes from coverage in our local newspaper, the Press Democrat.
