Lyke Magazine

One time, when I was in 8th grade, I had a shop teacher.  His name was Mr. Stawovy and he was missing three fingers.  

I used to be a part of my school’s TV news program called Cougar News.  Mr. Stawovy, when he wasn’t helping us use the lathe to make candlestick holders or showing us how to make C02 cars, was in charge of Cougar News.

One morning before our broadcast, Mr. Stawovy was in rare form.  He is a very short, but hairy man, except for he is stark bald on top of his head, and in retrospect I believe that he was probably suffering through a divorce or midlife crisis when he said this to us (maybe he was even drunk, who knows?), but one morning he looked at our young, naïve faces and said: “Love and hate are only inches apart.”

With his troll-like demeanor, sawdust-covered jeans and plaid shirt, Mr. Stawovy didn’t seem very worldly to us pimple-faced, over made-up, pubescent teenagers, but deep down I knew the man was saying something important, and that stuck with me for the rest of my life.

In the here and now, as a soon-to-be graduate from a communication program (it turns out Cougar News changed my life and completely began my love for my career today as an independent filmmaker; The Cougar Review, the school news letter in high school, got me started on journalism later), I reflect on those words.  Love and hate are only inches apart.    

I think what Mr. Stawovy was trying to say was that the things in life that you love are the very things that you also hate.  Think about the deepest love that you’ve felt, and you’ve probably felt the deepest hate at some point in time for that same person or thing.  

When I first moved to Philly for school, it was a shock to the system for sure, but I felt that most of my major life changes happened when I was in 8^th grade.  In that year, I dumped my last-ever boyfriend, got my first-ever girlfriend, found out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, came out to my friends and family, AND puberty dealt me the biggest boobs in the school (I was later surpassed in high school).  

As my college years now come to a close and I get ready to graduate this month, I think about that time and I kind of feel myself swinging back to some of the rapid changes I was facing during the Cougar News era of my life.  Oddly enough, even my last-ever boyfriend and my first-ever girlfriend from that time even contacted me simultaneously, when I hadn’t heard from either of them in two and seven years.  

One thing I can say that I’ve discovered is that we really are growing.  Sometimes people that were a part of your past don’t fit with who you are now, but they will always be there because they are a part of you.  There are people in your past that you have loved deeply, and now you either hate the situation that you’re friendship is in now; you hate the person they’ve become, that you’ve become; or, likewise, someone you hated in your past you have found that you love now.  I think that you’ll find that as life goes on, the things that you like disappear, but things that you love turn to hate – which means they are always only inches away.  

That being said, I present to you, The Love/Hate Issue.

P.S. Speaking of hate, I hate that LYKE mag is late.  Sorry!  The good news is we got lots of great submissions this month.  I definitely recommend checking out all our essays (in the personal essays category) about what you LYKE DYKES love and hate, as well as Izzy’s film column, LYKEable Celluloid (check all the submissions out in the different categories listed on the home page).  The bad news is, though, our editing WOman-power is limited.  Your dear editor is battling senior thesis and also had a nasty run-in with the flu, while Izzy is battling his master’s courses in journalism.

I know, excuses, excuses.  All I’m saying is, unless you want to get in here and edit some stuff yourself (which would be really, really helpful if you have the skill set – see submissions page), then Lyke is going to have to be like a covert, secret lover that you have brief, steamy encounters with in inconspicuous, spontaneous places, and which are fleeting but fill you with enough passion to keep pursuing daily life – until our next rendezvous.

P.S. Also check out our partner, Philly Gay Calendar as well as Fuse and the Dyke March.  Fuse has a party coming, Emerge, that you should DEFINITELY check out.  You can find the info on Phillygaycalendar.com or Myspace.com/phillyfuse

February was the month that month that Lyke Mag was supposed to come out (whoops).  February is also Black History Month.  This article is going to be about history – some of it black, some of it Philly, and some of it lesbian.

“Sometimes we’ve got to create our own history.”  That is a quote from the movie The Watermelon Woman (1996), by Cheryl Dunye.  Let me tell you a little about Cheryl.

She is a lesbian, and she is black, and she knows Philly.  She is originally from Liberia and later spent a good deal of time in the Philadelphia area while getting her BA from Temple, her MFA from Rutgers and at some point back to Temple to teach.  Currently, according to her MySpace page, she is living in Pasadena, Ca.  Ok, some other important things.  She is successful.  The film in question, The Watermelon Woman, won the Teddy Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival when it came out in ’96.  She also made a film that was distributed by Miramax, has received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, garnered a Lifetime Achievement Award from Girlfriend’s Magazine, and lots more (her full resume and list of achievements is on her website, CherylDunye.com).

A black, powerful, eminent lesbian who is connected to the 215; yep, that’s LYKEable.  Did I mention that she is really hott, too? 

Back to The Watermelon Woman, though.  The “Dunyementary” as Cheryl refers to it, is essentially a Spike Lee-ish mockumentary.  Cheryl, played by herself, Cheryl, is working in a video store.  Cheryl is a wedding videographer with her friend, Tamara (Valerie Walker).  Cheryl is not really a videographer, though; she is a powerful, driven underground filmmaker, desperate to make the voice of African American women heard.  So, she turns to a place where African American women have been somewhat publicly humiliated: playing “mammies” in old southern plantation films.  She finds a movie with a beautiful starlet mammy, who’s name in the credits is only listed as The Watermelon Woman.  Cheryl spends the entire rest of the movie trying to uncover the secret of this mysterious Watermelon Woman.  

Now, this isn’t just some movie that had people laughing and crying for an hour and half then faded somewhere into an obscure video rental rack.  Shauna Swarts says it very eloquently in an article published on the website AfterEllen.com: “It’s also notable that a film that addresses racism and homophobia was denounced by one Senator Jesse Helms—preoccupied with the film’s single, graphic but tasteful and brief sex scene—as “flotsam floating down a sewer.” If that isn’t the mark of quality queer cinema, what is?”

The film really feels like Cheryl took racism, lesbians, Philadelphia, and the 90’s and shook them all up in an un-politically correct margarita.  The film got a write-up in the New York Times, where Times writer Stephen Holden trivially says, “The Watermelon Woman is a loose-jointed movie that goes on playful little tangents whenever it feels like it.”  That is a gross understatement.  

As Cheryl researches the Water Melon Woman, she learns that her name is Faye Richards, a local Philadelphia jazz singer and actress.  Cheryl learns that Faye was sleeping with a white woman director, Martha Page (who was either transgendered as a male or wore drag, it is unclear), to advance her career. 

As the movie progresses, Cheryl finds herself similarly in an evolving relationship with a white woman (played by Guinevere Turner).  She receives constant criticism from Tamara, who insinuates that she is a traitor to her own race.  Eventually, Cheryl does break up with Diana.  She doesn’t do it because she doesn’t want to date a white woman; she does it because she learns that Diana has already dated a large number of other black women (and men).  What is so significant about this movie is that Cheryl is questioning who she is.  She fears that Diana views her as a fetish object* and feels threatened by that, and I think that is a pretty important, rational fear among many African Americans that Cheryl Dunye has fearlessly brought to the screen, a glowing source of mass communication.

Needless to say, the film is controversial.  Some could argue that Cheryl should have continued to be with Diana if she loved her, and that the film could potentially be a model of reverse-racism.  Cheryl slyly hints that she doesn’t break up with Diana because she is racist by using another semi-significant white character, a pasty, gothic college student who works at the video store.  Tamara not only denounces Diana but also constantly harasses the goth chick at work, who Cheryl tries to defend and save from Tamara’s wrath.  Cheryl and Tamara’s relationship even becomes strained, and Tamara is portrayed as sort of mean and self-loathing, again, a hint that this movie isn’t just about hating white people, rather what it means to be a black lesbian woman.  

But, all that being said, anyone who watches The Watermelon Woman is going to have his or her own opinion on it.  LYKE it or not, Cheryl Dunye serves you that aforementioned margarita on a silver platter when you are done watching this one.  All I have to say is check it out yourself and see how you relate. – Raeann Drew 

P.S. Keep your eyes out for Philly visuals, one of the steamiest lesbian sex scenes ever filmed, and an AWESOME cameo by local writer Camille Paglia, in which she parodies herself.  

Question for reader:

What is your opinion on interracial relationships?  Have you ever been in one?  I personally think that being in an interracial relationship would be really hard, but it would be worth the struggle and only make you stronger if you deeply loved the person.  

Links:

CherylDunye.com

SistersinCinema.com

Shauna Swarts on the subject: http://www.afterellen.com/archive/ellen/Movies/2006/3/watermelon2.html

NY Times Article:

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/reviewres=9C04E2DD1430F936A35750C0A961958260

Again 

…without you lying on the grass

next to me,

I can still hear your breathing

Next to me, the rustle of the leaves

matched against the sound

of children’s play,

she is in a dream world

a place I am not allowed to go,

the way his hand lays across his stomach

lets me remember a place

I will never go again.

The laughter of that child

is nothing without you.

“No expectations”

you once told me,

or perhaps that was someone else.

The whispers I hear

when the snow is falling.

I captured once, the image

of a blind man

tying knots into the world.

Sleeping now for six days

a spirit only wanders in his dream.

The steam, or fog, or smoke

wraps around daylight

attempting only to grasp a reflection.

I can see the world

falling between us;

the words dropping just short of…

sinking fever from meaning

tumbling gasps into my throat.

Commitment of our energy;

we are becoming…

Something tells me I should wake up

the ringing and ringing and ringing

clinging to my ears.

Can someone retrain this memory?

erase the roads I don’t need memorized anymore.

Erase how I used to trace into your skin,

erase this sight of you,

erase the once was,

once were, once because, once since.

I think about this once since.

Something’s wrong once since,

once words cease flow,

once my hand is not my hand.

Not the same moment.

Not the same since.

There is a distance between reflection

and true skin.

Depth perception makes things quite different,

Unrecognizable.

This is once truth.

- Pisarczyk