(Via The Bilerico Project)
“Sonoma County CA separates elderly gay couple and sells all of their worldly possessions
Filed by: Kate Kendell

Without authority, without determining the value of Clay and Harold’s possessions accumulated over the course of their 20 years together or making any effort to determine which items belonged to whom, the county took everything Harold and Clay owned and auctioned off all of their belongings. Adding further insult to grave injury, the county removed Clay from his home and confined him to a nursing home against his will. The county workers then terminated Clay and Harold’s lease and surrendered the home they had shared for many years to the landlord.

Three months after he was hospitalized, Harold died in the nursing home. Because of the county’s actions, Clay missed the final months he should have had with his partner of 20 years. Compounding this tragedy, Clay has literally nothing left of the home he had shared with Harold or the life he was living up until the day that Harold fell, because he has been unable to recover any of his property. The only memento Clay has is a photo album that Harold painstakingly put together for Clay during the last three months of his life.

With the help of a dedicated and persistent court-appointed attorney, Anne Dennis of Santa Rosa, Clay was finally released from the nursing home. Ms. Dennis, along with Stephen O’Neill and Margaret Flynn of Tarkington, O’Neill, Barrack & Chong, now represent Clay in a lawsuit against the county, the auction company, and the nursing home, with technical assistance from NCLR. A trial date has been set for July 16, 2010 in the Superior Court for the County of Sonoma.

Read more about NCLR’s Elder Law Project.

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Are you disturbed by the story of how Clay Greene was treated by the County? Please blog about this, pass it on over Facebook or Twitter, just do whatever you can to help raise the visibility of what happened to Clay. Send a letter to the local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat at letters@pressdemocrat.com. Send them this link to NCLR’s page.” (end article)

Dogpoet says: I should caution against a rush to judgment here, as this is all third-hand information and since all of the extenuating circumstances are not known. But I think it is worth investigating, worth transparency, and since gays on Facebook and blogs successfully brought higher visibility to cases like the Rainbow Lounge raid in Ft. Worth.

Take your shirt off at a brand new location. See all you perverts at BLOWOFF, the stellar funky dance party hosted by Bob Mould and Rich Morel, here in San Francisco on Saturday night, April 10th, 10 pm, Slim’s, 333 11th Street

I may have been recently single on Valentine’s Day, but that will not deter me from passing along to my coupled readers opportunities like the following, where you could assist the academic community in figuring out what makes your love tick. The researcher emailed and asked if I would share this, and who am I to stand in the way of scientific progress?:

Engaged volunteers needed!

I am looking for volunteers for a study of attitudes towards marriage and parenthood among engaged couples. The study consists of a 25-30 minute online survey. To qualify for the study, you must be 20-35 years old, live in the U.S., and plan to marry or have a commitment ceremony within the next 365 days. You and your romantic partner must not have children, and this must be the first marriage for both of you.

You can:

-Help a doctoral candidate;
-Increase the pool of scientific knowledge;
-Support research on marriage and families; and
-Spend some time thinking about your relationship!

I am working with Dr. Charlotte J. Patterson, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. This study has been approved by the University of Virginia Institutional Review Board #2009025800.

If you and/or your romantic partner are interested in participating or want further information, please email me at survey.couples@gmail.com. I will send you a link that you can use to access the study.

Thanks!

Cristina Reitz-Krueger
Doctoral Student
University of Virginia
(434) 243-8558
survey.couples@gmail.com

Excuse the fits and starts. Toiling away on my workshop curriculum (starts tomorrow) and trying to figure out if and how I should incorporate my Twitter updates here on dogpoet. I’m now leaning towards leaving them out; context might be everything, and they seem even more mundane here, away from the Twitter stream. Besides, my writing-to-social-networking ratio could use some recalibration.

Question typed into Google: “Does humping a pillow at eleven years old lead to an early sex life?”

Answer: Yes.

Lots of rollover minutes, too.

For that reading I’m doing Wednesday at the publication launch for the new issue of Fourteen Hills:

“Please join us for the release of Fourteen Hills vol. 15.1, an international literary magazine that publishes innovative poetry, fiction, short plays, and literary nonfiction. Fourteen Hills is San Francisco State University’s literary review, committed to presenting a diversity of experimental and progressive work by emerging and cross-genre writers, as well as award-winning and established writers. Contributers have included Peter Orner, Robert Glück, Pam Houston, Lydia Davis, Mary Gaitskill, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Ray Bradbury.”

Bollyhood Cafe
3372 19th St (at Mission)
Wed, December 17th, 2008
7 pm

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This past summer I was fortunate enough to catch my friend Yen Tan’s new movie, Ciao, at the Castro Theater during the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. And though I had rock-star seats, sitting with the director, Jeff, and the Manly Fireplug in the center of the packed house, we later lost Yen to the adoring crowd of film fans and media, for good reason.

It’s a wonderfully funny and bittersweet story, and if you’re in San Francisco or Berkeley you can catch the movie again during its theatrical release. Screening times and locations here, along with a listing of upcoming cities.

And as long as I’m whoring out one friend, let me do another. My buddy Dan White, who went through the Columbia MFA program with me, and with whom I had a couple of workshops, had his amazingly funny and poignant book, The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind and Almost Found Myself on the Pacific Crest Trail published recently, to much acclaim. And all of it is deserved. Imagine if Woody Allen and a reluctant Diane Keaton got lost hiking, and you’ll get close to the exuberant, neurotic energy of the book. I always looked forward to reading Dan’s workshop submissions, which should tell you something, considering all of the submissions we had to read during those two years.

He’ll be appearing at the Mission Bay Branch of the SF Public Library tomorrow, December 10th, 6:30 pm.

Every once in a while you can still stumble across a whole new way to waste time on the internet. Today I drove the Manly Fireplug up to Sacramento and back so that he could get his barber license transferred to his new shop (more on this soon).  Along the way we listened to REM and when he asked me what the hell Michael Stipe was saying in the chorus of “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight,” we pulled the lyrics up on my Blackberry, and then came across a few listener interpretations, which I  would like to share with you.

First the lyrics:
“This here is the place I will be staying.
There isn’t a number. You can call the pay phone.
Let it ring a long, long, long, long time.
If I don’t pick up, hang up, call back, let it ring some more.
If I don’t pick up, pick up…
The sidewinder sleeps, sleeps, sleeps in a coil
(chorus)
Call me when you try to wake her up. Call me when you try to wake her.
Call me when you try to wake her up. Call me when you try to wake her.
Call me when you try to wake her up. Call me when you try to wake her.

There are scratches all around the coin slot
like a heartbeat, baby trying to wake up,
but this machine can only swallow money.
You can’t lay a patch by computer design.
It’s just a lot of stupid, stupid signs.

Tell her,
tell her she can kiss my ass,
then laugh and say that you were only kidding.
That way she’ll know that it’s really, really, really, really me.

Baby, instant soup doesn’t really grab me.
Today I need something more sub-sub-sub-substantial.
A can of beans or blackeyed peas, some Nescafe and ice,
a candy bar, a falling star, or a reading of Doctor Seuss;

The cat in the hat came back, wrecked a lot of havoc on the way,
always had a smile and a reason to pretend.
But their world has flat backgrounds and little need to sleep but to dream.
The sidewinder sleeps on his back.”

Sportcarder’s interpretation: “Definitely about a broken payphone..sidewinger is the phone cord (handset to box)…coin slot broken…call me back let it ring. Maybe bigger picture is this is drug-related. A person lives a poor life in a beat-up apartment with a phone booth down the end of the hall.”

ZinbobDan: “i think it’s pretty simple…this girl is giving him the cold soldier and he wants to call her…”

StarmanDX: “‘I’ve always thought it was about a missile launch, the guy wanting to be called as a warning, a sidewinder being a type of missile…”

Musicexplorer: “This track is Brilliant it’s words are full of humour and catchy melodies. It really about a homeless person who knows a girl who rings him now and then by the payphone. In verse 2 its like he asks someone else to wring her and tell her ‘she can kiss me ass…’”

Mero: “A friend of mine had me convinced the chorus was “Commie Italian Baker, huh.”

Legendracula: “A guy cant’ stay at his house anymore(evicted) and has to keep his pets sidewinder at his friends house. The friend has to do a REALLY good job of taking care of the snake, and if he ever has to wake it up, he better call mike. He keeps calling to check on the snake, hence the scratches on the coin slot. Maybe mike likes the friend to talk to the snake to, and to know that it’s really mike on the phone, the friend has to joke with the snake like mike would. tell her she can kiss my ass! etc The friend also has to feed the snake something “substantial” and – yes, read to the snake. In the end, the friend didn’t do such a good job, maybe because he fed the snake black eyed peas. The sidewinder doesnt’ sleep in a coil anymore.. he sleeps on his back… yep he’s dead.”