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Thursday, April 4, 2024
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Action: Reflecting upon Mental Action
Via Daily Dharma: Suffer Less, Find Clarity
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Wednesday, April 3, 2024
Via White Crane Institute // KATHY KOZACHENKO
Noteworthy
1974 -
On this date KATHY KOZACHENKO'S successful bid for a seat on the Ann Arbor, Michigan city council made her the first openly Gay or Lesbian American to win public office in the United States. Although Harvey Milk is many times mistaken for this historic first, Kozachenko's election predates his win by a few years. But you know, she's a woman, soooooo...
Kozachenko joined the Human Rights Party in the early 1970s. The differences between the platforms of the HRP and local Democrats dwindled, yet "Kozachenko's run as an out Lesbian ... provided her with a distinction to set her apart". She would go on to comment that "'the Democratic Party started to look and sound like us, so the students found no need to vote for us if they were saying the same thing, so we found something different to say'".
As an out student at the University of Michigan, Kozachenko rallied student radicals. They supported her progressive agenda, which included a fine of no more than five dollars for possession of small amounts of marijuana.
Another part of her platform included "a ceiling on the amount of profit a landlord could make from rents on a building". Running solely against a liberal Democrat, Kozachenko was elected to the Ann Arbor City Council on April 2nd, 1974. She won the seat "representing the city's second ward by fifty-two votes".
Kozachenko's HRP predecessors on the city council, Nancy Wechsler and Jerry DeGrieck, had come out as a Lesbian and a Gay man during their first and only terms on city council, thus becoming the first openly LGBT public-office holders in the United States. However, Wechsler and DeGrieck did not run for office as an open LGBTQ individual.
Kozachenko is overlooked as the first openly Gay elected official in the United States. On the day after the election in 1974, The New York Times ran an article that ignored the election of Kozachenko, and instead focused on the marijuana tax referendum. When listing the winning candidates, the Times depicted her as "a student at University of Michigan who described herself as a Lesbian".
In 2008, a reporter at the Washington Post misguidedly commended Gus Van Sant's Milk for "its poignancy in telling the story of the first openly Gay elected official in the United States, Harvey Milk". It was three days before LGBTQ historian Ron Schlittler set the record straight. (You’ll pardon the expression.)
Kozachenko served one two-year term before leaving politics. She continued to work as an activist in Brooklyn and then Pittsburgh. She would later meet her long-time partner, MaryAnn Geiger (who died in 2010), and have one son.
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
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Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Via Ram Dass, Love Serve Remember
To the extent that we are egos, we are somebodies. We come down and we become a somebody. As that awareness starts to identify as a soul, it immediately feels separate from our mother and everything else. Then we begin to experience another separation, now as ego.
So it’s a separation within a separation, if you will. That’s the descent into more and more dense form, and that form is what we live out as an incarnation. Somewhere along the line in that story, we awaken. We begin to realize we are not only the incarnation, that there is more to us than meets the eyes, and we begin to realize that the more that we think we are, we are. That leads us to re-look at our experiences and to open to new experiences that allow us to enter into other planes of consciousness, other perspectives, other ways of looking at it.
That awakening starts and at first, because you have been in such a thick substance, you’ve been so very entrapped in your story, in your body, in your suffering, that when you awaken there is a joy, a breath… it’s like coming above smog when you fly. But there is also a kind of fear of getting trapped again, and a tendency to push against the stuff you were trapped in. You can use that like a rocket booster to get you out there.
Ultimately though, as you get established more as a soul, more established as just awareness, which isn’t even you anymore, as those become more real, and you become more comfortable in them, you look and you see that the incarnation that you have taken wasn’t an error and it wasn’t failure, and you’re not making mistakes. It is just an unfolding process.
And it’s nothing so personal about it all. Your personality isn’t that interesting. At that point you start to, from a soul’s point of view, inhabit your incarnation, at first resignedly, and then ultimately joyfully, because it’s just God at play. It’s just form, it’s just form.
- Ram Dass
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Speech: Refraining from Harsh Speech
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