Sleek Gophers

Posted on August 27, 2002 in Anthropology Attitudes

Jodie confessed to Lynn and me that she preferred lesbian culture to the hetero life she lived in Modesto. No, her husband doesn’t need a lawyer. I am sure that she intends to keep enjoying the variety of carnal knowledge that produced two daughters for her.

Main Street culture bores her as it does me. Mothers who convene at Starbucks for their coffee to talk about health clubs, Rainbow Soccer, their husbands’ jobs, and church gossip bore people like us. Their husbands may be worse. They pull against exercise machines for hours so that they will have bodies like those they see in the magazines. They read the national bestsellers and US Today. They watch the same movies. They call themselves religious and conservative because the newspapers tell them that is fashionable. Sinclair Lewis probably wouldn’t find America different from what he saw in the 1920s except that the locus of banality has shifted. Carol Kennitcott would be just as miserable in today’s California suburbs as she was in Gopher Prairie.

Jodie and myself are outcasts on the inside, folks who live in the suburbs and conform to society’s gender roles, but who make our own rules for just about everything else. We reject the bells, whistles, and other muzakical trappings of 21st century culture that stupefy so many others. We want laughter that is real, ideas that provoke, and activities that develop unexpectedly. We want interesting friends who don’t arrive in our lives like mass-produced chocolate cupcakes. We want the freedom to swear or to pray as the spirit moves us. We want to move among a society filled with people fresh from the oven and irregular like scones.