 | | All in the Mix: A Conversation With Writer Rebecca Walker
By Erin Raber
Rebecca Walker flies into the upscale San Francisco restaurant 45 minutes late, enveloped in a long black leather jacket and stylish sunglasses.
She greets me with an apologetic warm smile and goes on about the Bay Bridge traffic, the toxins around her home in Berkeley, Calif., her cat who just died of cancer, her hectic touring schedule and how bored she is by the formalities of the face-to-face interview. "I've been so buttoned up for the last few months, I just feel like everything I do is so fucking serious," she says as she changes her order and requests a lunchtime Cosmopolitan rather than a glass of champagne. Calling herself a lightweight, Walker stops drinking halfway through her cocktail and talks about the trials of touring. "I just came yesterday from Arkansas, Minneapolis and eastern Michigan," she says. "I spoke in Mankato [Minn.], which is this really depressed town.
The second I got there I felt like something was really deeply wrong with this place. The woman who brought me out was saying that there was one of the biggest massacres of Native Americans in that area.
So, it's weird like that to go to all these different places and just get these different hits of these environments and cultures." (More in the current issue of Curve)
Curve's 6th Annual Photo Contest
Grand Prize Karen Mitchell Hoboken, N.J. "Does Life Get Any Better"
Photographer and writer Jill Posener mused with me the meaning behind this year's collection of photo-contest entries. Contrasting these images with time-worn archival photos of the 1950s and earlier, she explained, you really get a sense of how much things have changed. Looking at the older photos, she said, you feel you're looking into someone's private life. Today, as we can see on these pages, the possibility exists to show the whole of our lives not just the fragments. True, I said, and we have the photos to prove it!
Gretchen Lee
Special thanks to the sponsors of this year's photo contest: Camp Pleiades, Damron Company, Girls and Company, Holly's Place, Melissa's Bed & Breakfast, Naiad Press, OUT!wear, Sumiche Handwrought Jewelry, Tom Boyz Productions and Wolfe Video.
Women on the Ice
By Gretchen Lee
On November 13, 2000, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen began an adventure they hoped would land them a spot in the history books.
At the ages of 45 and 47, these two veterans of numerous polar explorations set out to do what no other women have done cross Antarctica by their own power. Nearly 100 days later, after months of skiing, hiking and windsailing through subzero temperatures and bracing winds, their journey ended almost quietly at the edge of the giant, floating Ross Ice Shelf. There the two women waited for airlift, bundled up in their tent near a hastily built airstrip they'd constructed by themselves. Though Bancroft, an out lesbian from Minnesota, and Arnesen, a straight woman from Norway, had succeeded in becoming the first women to cross the Antarctic land mass, their journey's end brought with it some degree of disappointment. They had hoped to tack on an extra leg to their journey and sail triumphantly on their own into nearby McMurdo Base. But poor wind conditions forced them to make a decision: risk it all or stop now in the interests of safety.
SoapDish Eden Riegel All My Children's Bianca Montgomery She's young, smart and the cutest lesbian to come along on daytime television ever!
By Karen Wolitzer
If an award were given to the straightest woman on television it would have to go to All My Children's Erica Kane, because she has devoted the past 30 years of her life to finding the man of her dreams. And even though she's been married and divorced more times than we can count, she still believes he's out there and when she finds him, he'll make her life complete. So when rumors started to fly that her 16-year-old daughter, Bianca, was going to be the first lesbian to come along on the show since Donna Pescow played a lesbian therapist for a brief time in 1983, it was all the more delicious, because we knew Erica would go crazy and a fabulous story would unfold.
How to Make Love Last*
What can we learn from couples who have managed to stay together through thick and thin?
By Annika Dukes
I've always thought that my inability to imagine "forever" in a relationship has something to do with my parents' divorce. This probably has some truth, but the more I've talked with people about their ideas about what it takes to stay together, the more I've realized hardly anyone seems to believe in the idea of "forever." And those who do might be in for a big letdown. The fact is that relationships whether gay or straight or something in between are more likely to end (eventually) than to last. As therapist Marny Hall, author of The Lesbian Love Companion, reminded me, "It's very hard to be with people from your teens until you're 80. Break-ups are very important," she says. "You don't learn how to be together in a daily way unless you screw it up a few times."
Summer Fling
Text and Styling by Tietjen Fischer
Photography Billy Winters
Cruisin' to the beach is more fun when you get down to the basics s bikini tops and muscle Ts.
Searching for Lisboans A Return to Portugal, the Country of Her Ancestors
By Kris Scott Marti
After spending a hundred years in California, my family finally got me, the lone out lesbian, to serve as our first unofficial ambassador back to the motherland Portugal. When I stepped off the plane into the November Lisbon sunshine, I felt my heart swell in my chest and squeeze the air out of my lungs like a great big bear hug. Portugal's deep roots extend back through Moorish invasions, Roman conquerors, Greeks, Celts and prehistoric peoples. We're talking ancient history and that is an important perspective to keep since the cab ride into Lisbon looks disappointingly ghetto at first. The disappointment wears off quickly when the English-speaking cabbie (lots of Portuguese speak English these days) drops us off at the charming Elevador da Glσria, which is something like a small cable car, for our ride up the hill to the Bairro Alto.
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