Reina Gattuso

Tips on Queer Dating When You Come Out Later in Life

It started, as many queer stories do, with a woman at a bar. Anne-Marie Zanzal was 19 years old, and when she saw the beautiful woman that day, something moved in her. “Wow!” Zanzal, now an author, grief counselor, and ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, said to herself. But as quickly as the feeling flared up, Zanzal squashed it. It was the 1980s, the AIDS crisis was at its height in the queer community, and for many young people, the prospect of coming out was difficult, if not a death sentence. “The homophobia was just rampant,” Zanzal says.

It would take Zanzal thirty more years, four kids, a career, a marriage to a man, and an ordination to come out as a lesbian. When she finally did, in 2016 when she was in her early fifties, the process was terrifying. Her marriage ended, she experienced discrimination at work, and she endured the upheaval of publicly becoming a member of a marginalized community. “I spent six months in the fetal position,” Zanzal says.

Today, as an out lesbian soon to be married to her current partner, Zanzal couldn’t be prouder. “I was so done being closeted,” she says. As a counselor and a community leader in an online lesbian group, she’s turned her experience into a source of strength for other women coming out later in life.

Read more at Swell. Photo credit: Jez Timms, Unsplash.

How a Black-Owned 19th-Century Tavern Became the Birthplace of a Beloved Cookie

HERE IS WHAT HISTORIANS HAVE been able to piece together about the lives of tavern-keepers Joseph and Lucretia Thomas Brown. Lucretia Thomas was born in 1772 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a rough-and-tumble seaport just south of Salem. She was most likely born free, but her parents had been previously enslaved by Continental Navy Captain Samuel Tucker.

When Lucretia was a young woman, she met Joseph Brown, who’d been born into slavery as the son of an African-American mother and a Wampanoag Nation father. Brown had fought in the Marblehead militia as part of the Revolutionary army, which likely led to his emancipation from slavery and his reputation, according to one local memorial, as a “respected citizen” of the seaside town. Together, the couple operated a tavern from the small saltbox-style house they purchased in 1795, perched near a frog pond on Marblehead’s Gingerbread Hill.

Read more at Atlas Obscura. Featured image my own.

In Canada, Gold Rush-Era Garbage Reveals a History of Chinese Immigrant Cuisine

DAWN AINSLEY, STAFF ARCHAEOLOGIST AT Canada’s Gold-Rush-era Barkerville historic town and park, was overseeing the installation of a new sewer line in 2012 when diggers struck a different kind of gold: garbage. “Every time we hit a garbage dump we had to stop and monitor it,” says Ainsley of the dig. The site of a largely Chinese-Canadian mining town established in the 1860s, and now an open-air museum, Barkerville is full of meaningful trash, the result of generations of household waste tossed off back porches and into alleyways.

But this particular garbage pit—or midden, in archaeological speak—wasn’t just off any old porch. It was located between two historic restaurants, the now-defunct Doy Ying Low restaurant, established in the 1870s, and the Lung Duck Tong, established in the 1920s, which continues to serve as an eatery for visitors today. When Barkerville staff started digging through the find, they uncovered a unique record of the daily culinary life of the thousands of Chinese-Canadian prospectors who had left China for the promised “gold mountains” of Western Canada’s mining towns. Findings included evidence of a century-old pig roast, dominoes and drinking parties, and one very old, still-intact piece of canned meat similar to Spam.

Read more at Atlas Obscura. Featured image: Mike, CC BY-SA 2.0

How to Plant a Home Garden and ‘Free the Seed’

Of all the wonders in this wide world, there is none quite like the seed. With time, sun, and a little luck, a brown speck that fits on your fingernail can grow into a vast sequoia. Last year’s spit picnic seeds can become this year’s watermelon patch. And flecks from a few potato flowers can feed a nation.

It begins tentatively: A root stretches into soil, a sprout reaches toward the sun. Yet contained within each garden seed is a living record of the long-gone farmers who, over thousands of years, nursed bitter wild leaves and toxic forest fruits into the greens, beans, and grains that sustain us today. With each crop, these farmers chose the tastiest, highest-yielding plants, saved the seeds, and passed those tiny pieces of magic down to their children, eventually creating the cultivars we now know.

“Just a couple of generations ago, everybody was a seed saver,” says Ben Cohen, a farmer and founder of the Michigan Seed Library Network and Central Michigan Seed Swap. “You had to be a seed saver to grow your own food.”

Read more at Atlas Obscura. Featured image: Jen Theodore, Unsplash.

How to Become an Ally in Our Intimate Lives

Often, we find a vision of a better world when we’re most in crisis. I was a young, queer woman in an abusive relationship with a partner who was marginalized in different ways than me. I needed help, but none of the institutions supposedly built for survivors—police, anti-harassment committees, even mainstream anti-violence orgs—spoke to my experience, or to those of my queer women and trans friends. As we attempted to build healthy relationships at the intersections of multiple identities, we longed for accountability and care, but conventional systems promised only retribution.

So we turned to each other, and to the writings of women- and queer-of-color-led collectives. These visionary organizers argue that marginalized people cannot have healthy relationships until we have healthy communities, free of economic exploitation and institutional racism, sexism, and homophobia. They advocate for the abolition of police and prisons, for investment in marginalized people’s well-being, and for the idea that communities, not repressive power structures, keep us safe.

The recent Black-led uprisings against systemic anti-Black racism and police violence have thrust this vision into the spotlight. As protesters fill the streets with demands to defund and abolish the police, we are all challenged to create more just and egalitarian relationships and communities. For those of us with racial privilege, this means reflecting on the ways we have used our privileges to cause harm, and committing to actively anti-racist ways of living and loving.

Read more at Swell. Featured image: AllGo, Unsplash.

Black Lives Matter: How White People Can Get Educated and Stay Grounded

As Black Americans’ righteous resistance to racism and police brutality fills social media and the streets, many white Americans are in a period of reevaluation. We may find ourselves wondering what our role is in perpetuating systemic, anti-Black racism, and how we can take action that is actively anti-racist.

This self-introspection is a fundamental starting point in the fight to build a more just society. It’s also an intense and deeply humbling process, at a time when a global pandemic has everyone stretched thin. It’s totally understandable to feel many conflicting emotions right now, including sadness, concern, confusion, guilt, or even a desire for things to return “back to normal.” At the same time, it’s important to remember that — as the brutal toll of the coronavirus pandemic on communities of color, and the police killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others have especially highlighted — “normal” has never been safe for Black Americans.

The current moment, then, presents white Americans with the opportunity, and the obligation, to help create a new “normal” in which we no longer participate in, and benefit from, the oppression of Black people. It requires us to engage in a process of self-examination, education, and unlearning. Here are some ideas for white people engaging in this process.

Read more at The Talkspace Voice. Featured image: Koshu Kunii, Unsplash

Black Lives Matter: Mental Health Resources For And By People of Color

For the past week, the United States has witnessed an uprising against racism and racist police brutality unseen since the aftermath of the 1968 assasination of Martin Luther King Jr. While many white Americans are only now waking up to the realities of police brutality against Black communities, racism has always undergirded American life — and people of color have always known and borne this burden.

From police brutality to health inequality — particularly visible during the coronavirus pandemic — and racist microaggressions, people of colors’ lived experiences of racism take a severe mental health toll. Racism is a form of trauma. Experiences of brutality, harassment, and stigma can lead to PTSD symptoms; so too can repeated exposure to videos of racist police brutality on social media. As a result of this profound stress, Black Americans are 20% more likely than white Americans to live with mental illness.

Today, dozens of Black- and people of color-led grassroots organizations, clinics, and collectives provide therapeutic resources for communities that experience racist oppression. Below, we’ve compiled a list of some of these groups as a starting point; countless more are doing difficult, phenomenal community wellness work every day. These resources include both conventional talk therapy — often at subsidized rates and available remotely during the coronavirus pandemic — as well as self-care resources and healing practices.

Celebrate the Heyday of Sweet American ‘Salads’ With These 7 Dishes

IN THE 1950S, A FOOD trend swept the United States: the sweet salad. World War II had ended, and with it wartime rationing, but Americans’ penchant for canned goods persisted. The combination of the increased popularity of preserved foods and the overall postwar atmosphere of abundance led to a widespread love for dishes that were modern, decorative, and convenient. This included technicolor “salads” made from multiple processed ingredients, like powdered gelatin and canned fruit. Epitomizing this mix of social forces, in all its trembling, fruit-filled, jewel-hued glory, was the Jell-O mold. Consisting of a mix of sweet, and often savory, ingredients suspended in elaborate rings of wiggly instant gelatin, these creations shone from the pages of Betty Crocker and The Joy of Cooking books, and festooned the countertops of suburban America.

Read more at Atlas Obscura. Featured image: Matt Briney, Unsplash.