The nation’s leading breast-cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is halting its partnerships with Planned Parenthood affiliates — creating a bitter rift, linked to the abortion debate, between two iconic organizations that have assisted millions of women.

The change will mean a cutoff of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, mainly for breast exams. Read the rest of the story on NPR

Nixon and Marinoni with their son, Max Nixon-Marinoni

The rainbow-hued wires have been buzzing this week with bitching and tsking over actress Cynthia Nixon’s interview with the New York Times Magazine, where she told writer Alex Witchel that for her, being gay is a choice.

Her comment was made while telling a story about how she prepared an empowering speech for a gay audience, and was counseled to edit out the line, “I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better”. Event organizers felt that Nixon’s statement implied that homosexuality can be a choice which was not a message they supported, to which she replied, “And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.”

Immediately, Nixon began to be pecked at by the self-righteous peckers of gay rights organizations and the gay press, who hopped up and down and said her statement fuels the conservative belief that gay can be prayed away.

Today, Nixon made a statement to The Advocate, in an attempt to clarify and contextualize her comment:

“My recent comments in The New York Times were about me and my personal story of being gay. I believe we all have different ways we came to the gay community and we can’t, and shouldn’t be, pigeon-holed into one cultural narrative which can be uninclusive and disempowering. However, to the extent that anyone wishes to interpret my words in a strictly legal context I would like to clarify:

“While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact. What I have ‘chosen’ is to be in a gay relationship.”

So there. We made her turn in her gay card so she could be reissued a bi card. Now that we’ve forced the woman into clarifying her sexual orientation for us, we can all feel better about our own gayness.

Why does the LGBT community continually act like it’s Gay Day at Disneyland and the gayest amongst us will go to the front of the line at Space Mountain?

Nixon, 46, was in a 15-year relationship with a man that started in her early 20s. The two have two children together. Since 2004, she has been in a relationship with education activist Christine Marinoni. Marinoni gave birth to the couple’s son in 2011.

Nixon’s story isn’t that different than mine (well, except for all her talent and fame). I also came out in my 30s. I was married to a man, and together we had a child. Since I’m confessing: it was actually my second marriage to a man. I was involved in two opposite-sex relationships that totaled nearly 27 years, the first a right-after-college-graduation marriage to my high school sweetheart.

No one, especially  not a reporter, has ever sat me down to ask if I think my lesbian identity is a choice. But I’d probably say “yes”.

Make no mistake, I’m as gay as the next dyke. But somewhere back before the turn of the century, I made a clear-cut decision to come out and live the rest of my romantic life in the company of women. Life with men wasn’t awful. I suppose I could have kept doing it – and millions of women have, for reasons of security, religion, and fear of being ostracized.

But the question of could I do it again is a much tougher one. There are just too many variables. I’ve never identified as bi because I never pictured myself returning to relationships with men. And, admittedly, I’m the first one to rankle when Dan Savage starts talking about the sexual fluidity of women. I don’t think of my sexuality as all that fluid. Before I came out, I just hadn’t considered my options.

I thought of myself as perfectly straight, right up until I met a woman who rang my chimes harder than any man ever had. While I didn’t have a relationship with her, I was so unnerved, I was compelled to look deeper into myself. It was my own dark night of the soul. But unlike Jonah, I wasn’t coughed up in a ball of whale spit. Instead, I landed on the beach covered in lube and waving the rainbow flag.

So I was married to men. Does that make me less gay now?

Consider this: With the exception of a very few Gold Star Lesbians, every lesbian woman I know has slept with more men than I have (three).

I understand why we don’t want to give haters any more ammunition to use against us, but the sort of backlash aimed at Nixon fractionates us. It divides our own community into gay, gayer, gayest, bisexual, and so forth. It’s a complete waste of energy that could be better spent scaffolding our community, not tearing it down.

This type of reactionary thinking panders to conservatives and will ultimately hinder the gay rights movement.

For example, in a 2006 article in Pediatrics: The Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics supporting gay marriage, the Academy stated  that the vast majority of children with parents in same-sex relationships were conceived in heterosexual relationships. So when we talk about gay families, should we exclude them from our numbers? Make them draw a bi card? No, we need to coax these moms and dads out to be counted. We need to encourage them to come out to their family doctors. Then, perhaps the estimated number of kids being raised by gay parents won’t be so wide-ranging, anywhere from 1 million to 10 million in the U.S., and will settle near the higher end (and probably more realistic) figure.

That’s how we gain political clout.

For political recognition, we don’t need fractions, we need whole numbers. We need to throw our gay arms open and embrace the entire damn rainbow.

While we’re at it, let’s all apologize to Cynthia Nixon. She tries to do right by our community. And, she’s more than gay enough for me.

She held out her wineglass, and I filled it four-fifths of the way up with chardonnay. Her eyes widened.

“Trying to get me drunk?”

I leaned back against the kitchen counter, taking the time to survey her. I smiled what I hoped was my cockiest smile.

“Lady, I don’t even know you.”

She took a sip and cut me a look over the rim of her glass.

“But that’s one hell of a dress.”

In a ranch house party full of people in jeans and pullovers, she was wearing a black velvet halter dress and black cowboy boots.

“You think? It is New Year’s Eve, after all.”

She turned around, revealing the back, which cut low — almost to her ass — framing a long stretch of silky, white skin and a tiny tattoo of the Greek letter Pi low at the base of her spine. Her dark hair hid the nape of her neck.

I fought the urge to reach out and run my fingers across her skin and instead took a gulp of my wine.

“Hmmm,” I said, appraisingly.

“Go on.” She looked back at me over her shoulder. I saw the faint beginnings of goosebumps on her skin, rising under my gaze.

“Um. It makes me want to…” I blushed. “Never mind.”

She turned to face me.

“No, really, go on. It makes you want to what?”

I looked down at my shoes, avoiding her eyes, and said in low voice: “It makes me want to make love to the small of your back.”

She smiled at me and turned away again.

“Here?” she asked, pointing to her tiny tattoo. “On Pi? Why, that could go on infinitely.”

I laid my thumb very low on her back, at the edge of her dress. Right between the two dimples that marked the base of her spine. Right on the tattoo.

I lingered there for a moment and then pulled my hand away.

A dress like that should be illegal.

She paused for a moment and a light shiver ran up and down her back, like a horse shaking off flies. Then she turned to me.

“And how would you do that?”

I stepped aside to give someone access to the sink, and another person reached between us for a bottle of wine, mumbling “’cuse me”. Still my eyes were locked on hers.

“I guess I could show you…”

“Here?” Her eyebrows raised mockingly as she looked around the kitchen.

“How ‘bout there?” I cocked my head towards the bedroom at the foot of the stairs. “I think the door locks.”

She paused for a moment, looking at me thoughtfully.

“Well, I know a dare when I see one.” She turned and walked away from me, the full skirt of the velvet dress swirling around her legs.

I gulped down the last of my wine and followed her.

After all, a dare’s a dare.

The room was dark and I reached for the light switch, and then I heard her voice.

“No, don’t turn it on.”

So I didn’t.

“Come here,” she said. I walked across the room to where she was sitting on the edge of the bed. We didn’t touch.

“Now exactly how would you make love to the small of my back?”

“You’ll have to lay down,” I said.

She leaned back on the bed.

“No,” I said. “This is simply a demonstration. Face down, on the bed, lengthwise.”

In the darkened room, the black of her dress melted into the coverlet, but her skin glowed in the tiny amount of light that leaked through the window. I could hear the party heating up outside the door, the band beginning to play, and voices raising to be heard above the music.

She stretched out there, her forehead resting on her hands, legs spread wide, covered by the flow of velvet. I kicked off my shoes and climbed up on the bed and knelt between her legs and sat back on my heels. I could feel the heat of her thighs through my jeans. Her ass rose up in a sweet mound in front of me, and I could see her back rising and falling, gently, with her breath.

“I’d begin something like this,” I said.

I placed my hands on the bed on each side of her waist and leaned forward over her, touching just the tip of my tongue to the small of her back. Then shifting my weight forward, being careful not to lean on her, I slowly traced a small, wet line up her spine, as far as I could go. I heard the sharp intake of her breath, and before I sat back on my heels again, I realized my arms were trembling.

She turned her head so I could hear her, lifting her hair up and away from her face and neck, her cheek on the coverlet.

“Can you do that again?” she asked, voice breathy now. Her arms spread, palms pressing into the bed, as though bracing herself.

“Say please.”

Softly.

“Oh, please?”

This time I pressed the entire wide flat of my tongue to her spine, right on the letter Pi, and began stroking it up her back. I could hear her begin to breathe through her mouth, so I went to work in earnest, licking my way up her spine with feather strokes and alternating with wide strokes. When her hips began to move, I pressed the heel of my hand into the small of her back.

“Shhh. Lay still.”

“Sweet Jesus,” she mumbled.

I leaned a little farther forward, turning my head, and pressed my open mouth into the small of her back. I paused there, swirling the tip of my tongue on her skin, inside the ring of my lips, and then began to suck gently at the deepest part of the curve of her back. Her ass lifted slightly in response.

“Am I doing okay?”

Her ragged breath was my only response.

“Good, then I’ll go on.”

She moaned softly.

Again I sat back on my heels. She waited, not moving, but I could feel the tension in her thighs.

Taking my time and moving quietly, I unbuttoned my starched shirt and untucked it, sliding it off my shoulders.

“This is the massage portion of your demonstration…”

I placed my hands on her low back and began to massage in sweeping strokes, from the edge of her dress to the base of her shoulderblades. My thumbs worked their way up her spine.

“God, that feels good.”

As I continued to work her muscles, I could feel her melting under my hands. I wanted her relaxed, but not too relaxed.

Time to move on.

I stopped and stretched out my body, bringing the peaks of my nipples to the naked skin of her back. Supporting myself on my hands, I began to lightly brush my tits back and forth across the tender skin there.

Suddenly her breathing faded beneath the drumming in my own ears. The sounds of the party faded away. It seemed my entire world had condensed down into this warm patch of skin on her back and the electric connection with my nipples. It was my breath that was ragged now. I was losing control.

“Wait.”

Her first request didn’t even pierce my consciousness. She had to say it again:“Wait.”

I sat back, panting a little.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “That was one outrageous demonstration.”

“I could go on.” I know I sounded pathetically hopeful.

I felt her hands at her hips, gathering the velvet dress and creeping it up her thighs.

“I was hoping you would.”

###

When the crew and family readiness group of the dock landing ship Oak Hill sold raffle tickets for the first kiss at homecoming, Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta bought 50. Since that is fewer than many people buy, Gaeta never guessed she win the kiss. But she did, and when the Oak Hill docked in Virginia Beach after nearly three months training with military allies in Central America, Gaeta’s girlfriend of two years, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell, was waiting when she crossed the bow.

This is the first time the happily reunited couple has been gay. The women kissed and the crowd cheered.

Don’t ask. Just tell them we’re home.

Today, I introduced him to the charms of Hannah Hart’s “My Drunk Kitchen”. Sure, it’s probably inappropriate viewing for a kid, but he says it beats the crap out of anything he’s seen on The Food Network. Hannah is funny, gay, and a little nuts. We’re both in love with Hannah.