August, 2011

Tallahassee’s Monthly LGBT Newspaper VOL. XV, Issue 7 • August 2011 BRANCHING OUT is published monthly by The Family Tree Community Center, Inc. Appearance in this publication makes no inference about sexual orientation or gender identity.

BRANCHING OUT’S mission is to be the paper of record for the LGBT community of Tallahassee, and in that capacity it seeks to inform, advocate, engage, and entertain while being a responsible representative of the LGBT community and its allies to the outside world.

Capital City GLBTA Democratic Caucus Elects New Officers News Release

At its annual membership meeting on June 13, 2011, the membership of the Capital City GLBTA Democratic Caucus elected new officers to lead the organization during the 2011 through 2013 fiscal years. The newlyelected officers are: Andy Janecek, President Michelle Comingore, Vice-President Tim Frizzell, Treasurer Erica “tiny” Belcher, Secretary

The mission of the Capital City GLBTA Democratic Caucus is to foster good will between gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and ally (GLBTA) members of the Democratic Party and the community at large. We seek individual freedom in the framework of a just society and political freedom in the framework of meaningful participation by all citizens. For more information about the organization, visit www.ccglbtdems.org.

Also during the annual meeting, the Board of Directors approved the organization’s first-ever annual budget built around the goals of increasing membership and maximizing efforts to educate the voting public, increase voter registration and to further support the election of equality-minded Democratic candidates in local, state and national elections.

PFLAG Tallahassee Celebrates Two Years of Service News Release

On June 9, Tallahassee’s chapter of PFLAG (Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays) celebrated its two year anniversary with a birthday cake and refreshments at its monthly meeting. During the meeting, a presentation entitled “Know Your History Teach In 101” was presented by Susan Gage, Lisa Medley, Ron Bunting and Stephen Mitchell.

PFLAG Tallahassee meets on the 2nd Thursday of each month. For more information, contact Susan Gage at (850) 597-2374.

www.branchingoutnews.com

Contact Branching Out: P.O. Box 38477 Tallahassee, FL 32315 (850) 222-8555 branchingout@familytreecenter.org Submission Deadline 15th of Each Month

Production Team:

Andy Janecek, Executive Editor Steven Hall, Features Editor Patrick Patterson, Art Director and Layout Editor Margeaux Mutz, Voices Editor Melissa Henderson, Circulation Assistant Ron Bunting, Circulation Assistant

A COPY OF THE OFFICIAL REGISTRATION AND FINANCIAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE DIVISION OF CONSUMER SERVICES BY CALLING TOLL-FREE WITHIN THE STATE (1-800-HELP-FLA). REGISTRATION DOES NOT IMPLY ENDORSEMENT, APPROVAL, OR RECOMMENDATION

BY THE STATE.

We thank those who make

possible!

COMMUNITY CENTER

UP C OMING

EVENTS August 20 • 12 - 3pm Book and Yard Sale Donation Drop-off Day

August 22 Dine Out Day at BOTH Tallahassee Red Elephant Locations August 27 • 8am - 2pm Book and Yard Sale at The Family Tree August 27 Shop For a Cause at Macy’s * Savings Card must be purchased in advance at any of the above-listed events or by contacting The Family Tree.

September 12 • 6:30 - 8pm Board of Directors Meeting October 24 • 6:30 - 8pm Annual Meeting and Elections For more information about any of these events, contact The Family Tree at 850.222.8555 or staff@familytreecenter.org.

We have a wide selection of:

Birdseed Bird Feeders Optics Nesting Boxes Birdbaths Nature Gifts

1505-2 Governor’s Square Blvd

850-576-0002

www.wbu.com/tallahassee

by Ivan Sondel • Branching Out Contributor

Local Theatre: Tallahassee Little Theatre will NOT be presenting the play Next Fall in their 201112 season after all, but will instead present the Tennessee Williams drama Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.

Broadway: The annual Tony Awards were presented June 12th with Neil Patrick Harris as host (he won an Emmy the last time he hosted, and the show enjoyed its highest ratings in recent years). Harris opened the show with a hysterical musical comedy showstopper “Broadway: It’s Not Just for Gays Anymore” [which everyone knows is bullshit – it absolutely is!]. In what may very well have been the most entertaining Tony telecast ever the gay-inclusive The Book of Mormon dominated the awards winning a total of nine including Best Musical, Book, Score, Direction and Supporting Actress. Nick Stafford’s War Horse won for Best Play. Larry Kramer’s acclaimed AIDS play The Normal Heart won Best Revival, and Cole Porter’s Anything Goes took home the prize for Best Revival of a Musical with its star Sutton Foster winning as Best Actress.

Coming Soon: Books: now in stores: Where’s My Wand: One Boy’s Magical Triumph over Alienation and Shag Carpeting by Eric Poole; Remembrance of Things I Forgot by Bob Smith; My Baby Blue Jays a children’s book by John Berendt; Fallen a novel

by Karin Slaughter; Transparent a memoir by out CNN anchorman Don Lemon. Coming soon: 7/1: Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer

by Alexander Maitland; CD: now in stores: K. D. Lang Sing it Loud. DVDs: Now in stores: The Fabulous Beekman Boys; Gregg Araki’s Kaboom; Fran Lebowitz: Public Speaking; Children of God; From Beginning to End; Zazie dans le Metro classic French comedy of precocious young girl who comes to Paris for a weekend with her female impersonator uncle; Christopher and His Kind (reviewed in this issue). Coming soon: 7/12: My Dog Tulip. Coming to a movie theatre near you (Miracle 5?): Beginners starring Christopher Plummer as a gay man who comes out to his son after being widowed.

Congratulations: Jennifer Egan’s gay inclusive novel A Visit from the Goon Squad has won the Pulitzer Prize. The novel is now available in paperback. Out poet Kay Ryan also won for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems.

DVD Review: Christopher and His Kind (BBC Video). BBCVideo offers this truly inspired and (more importantly) faithful adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s memoir of the events that inspired his Berlin Stories. Matt Smith (the current Doctor Who) stars as Isherwood, off to Berlin to join W. H. Auden in pursuit of….not culture, or education, but boys! Most of Isherwood’s fiction was thinly veiled

autobiography and thus Christopher and His Kind could be interpreted as the unexpurgated Cabaret, for basically the stories are the same without the music. [Of course this made for television film doesn’t really compare with the Fosse/Minnelli classic].

Matt Smith plays Isherwood wonderfully well, capturing his initial sexual and political naïveté and burgeoning enlightenment. Indeed, what is most impressive in the performance is that we witness the character develop – not just sexually (yes, the film is explicit), but more importantly, politically, and as a keen observer and able chronicler of personal and world events.

As the flamboyant chanteuse Jean Ross - the inspiration for Sally Bowles, Isherwood’s most indelible literary creation - Imogen Poots is breathtakingly world-weary and heart-sore, vulnerable and sincere; it’s a performance worthy of special recognition. The underrated Toby Jones scores again as the unforgettable Gerald Hamilton (read: Mr. Norris from Mr. Norris Changes Trains), fortune’s fool and victim of time (he’s an aging, balding queen) and his own illbegotten schemes. Lindsay Duncan as Isherwood’s deliciously manipulative mother is a treat, while Perry Millwood is wantonly earnest as his all but forgotten brother Richard.

The script by Kevin Elyot and direction by Geoffrey Sax deserve praise for capturing the essence of Isherwood as well as the atmosphere of pre-war Berlin; in fact all the production elements are top drawer. Over all this is a glorious production and deserves a wide audience.

Passages: Out playwright Arthur Laurents died April 5th at age 93. Laurents wrote the musicals West Side Story, Gypsy, Anyone Can Whistle, Do I Hear a Waltz?, Hallelujah, Baby! (for which he won a Tony), Nick and Nora and many acclaimed plays, including Home of the Brave and Time of the Cuckoo (for which Shirley Booth won a Tony and which was later filmed by David Lean with Katharine Hepburn as Summertime). Laurents directed Barbra Streisand in I Can Get It for you Wholesale and won a Tony for his direction of the original production of La Cage aux Folles.

For the screen Mr. Laurents wrote the screenplays Hitchcock’s Rope (which starred his then partner Farley Granger), Snake Pit (uncredited), Anna Lucasta, Anastasia (for which Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar), Bonjour Tristesse, The Way We Were (with Streisand and Redford), and The Turning Point (with Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine, and which brought him two Oscar nominations).

In later years he directed the revivals of Gypsy starring Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly and Patti LuPone (all three actresses won the Tony for Best Actress in a musical), the acclaimed bi-lingual production of West Side Story and two acclaimed memoirs: Original Story by Arthur Laurents and Mainly on Directing.

Mr. Laurents was preceded in death by his partner of fifty years Tom Hatcher, who died in 2006. On May 6th the lights of Broadway were dimmed for one minute in tribute.

When Heaven And Hell Meet A Short Story By Vickie Spray • Part 2 Continued from Branching Out • May, 2011 I had not known there was a third choice! So, for a few weeks I was ecstatic. Maybe I did not have to go all the way into this strange land of Lesbos. Maybe I did not have to risk my identity as a woman who was a spiritual seeker, my place as an accepted member of society! I could be a bisexual! What a relief! This relief was short lived, however. Though this third status of bisexuality could offer a gray area, which seemed to me to be a more acceptable stance in the eyes of God and the men who made up all these rules, I had to be honest; even if I were bisexual, I was developing a preference for women. I knew I was going to have to go deep into this jungle of sin in order to satisfy my newly discovered passion for women.

Then I heard about the bar. The woman who had infiltrated (my word, not hers) the circle of lesbian friends shared her newfound information with gusto, bordering (I thought), on treason. I stood still and quiet as a sponge as she swaggered about in her position of “at least bisexual” and explained to the rest of us that there was a bar where these women go to party. It was called The Cactus and it was about an hour away from my two-room apartment.

The furor that had been building from my hours of sitting on church pews near God-loving women whose sweet perfume drifted around me, from the lunch-rush rebuff that my flirtations brought upon me, and now the talk of real lesbians sitting around, leisurely and secure, like husband and wife, exploded into a Friday night plan. I was going to The Cactus.

I knew I would need two things to actually go through with this. I would need to dress as manly as I could and I would need a bottle of wine. I knew (from the same place I knew everything else about this underground world of women) that a Lesbian could either be like a man or woman. And so, because I played softball, had always been tomboyish and a little envious of the rights of men, I chose the side that had the best chance of accomplishing the feat of meeting another woman like myself. I wore hiking boots and an oversized sweater. My hair was fairly short, though I wished I had thought to get it cut. The wine was a necessity because (as I had also learned from the rumor mill) if you walked into a place like that unaccompanied you could fully expect to be sexually accosted by women waiting for just such a chance. I was okay with that. Drinking the wine beforehand would make sure I stayed that way.

There was, however, something I forgot until I was well on my way into that cheap bottle of wine. I was underage. It is true that desperate minds will mother inventions. As I drove within the ping-ping sound of my VW, I invented a lie. By the time I reached the parking lot that had been described to me, I had what I thought was a decent enough story to get me into The Cactus.

I finished the bottle as I sat and watched people come and go. Again, I was astounded at how normal everyone looked. Well, not everyone. I did think that a few of the women were men until I got a side view and detected breasts or overheard some girlish laughter. And I mistook a small-bodied man for a woman until I heard him say something to the man next to him as they walked in front of my car on the way to the bar’s entrance. What I did not see, which I think I had expected to see, was shame. I didn’t know beforehand that I had this expectation. Of course we all project what we are feeling ourselves

and so their carefree jaunt across the parking lot took me by surprise. They seemed so carefree and blatant about where they were going! Of course, even with the wine, thoughts of a religious explanation for their lack of shame intruded on my excited and confused state of mind. These people were probably so far into their sin that they were indeed the “abomination” my pastor spoke of several Sundays ago, I thought.

Having lived in sin for so long, they had lost all semblance of a godly conscience.

This was a sobering thought. I suddenly realized that if I went any further with this, I might risk taking myself beyond the reach of God. If I acted on this Friday night venture, I might irrevocably step beyond any chance at the life of marriage, children and acceptability for which I was destined many years ago in the meeting of my father’s sperm and my mother’s waiting egg.

I got out of my car.

Two men sat on short stools by the door. They both had mustaches, which relieved me of the need for a time-consuming gender analysis. And then it occurred to me that having two men at the door would be beneficial, possibly increasing the chances that my lie would gain me entrance into the bar. From where I stood, I could see that smoke hung within the dim reach of a few lights scattered around a room full of loud music and raucous conversation. Screams of laughter burst amidst the sporadic clap of balls breaking on a pool table. Both men looked at me with the kind of interest I would expect from bouncers on duty.

“Hey guys,” I said, trying to appear nonchalant.

Both had large flashlights for the purpose of checking identification. I handed them the picture of a Georgia boy I had dated a few times. Georgia boy and I had ended up in his father’s barn the last time I saw him.

He had mailed me this picture after I stopped writing and now I was using it as a way to get into a gay bar.

“I’m trying to find my friend. He said he would be here tonight. Have you seen him yet?”

They both lifted flashlights to the picture and saw a young boy of maybe eighteen with delicate features and a sly smile.

“No, don’t think so,” one on the left said. The other shook his head and looked toward the bar no longer interested in the conversation.

“Ok, I’ll wait for him then. How much? ” I said as I pulled out my men’s wallet from my back pocket.

“Four,” he said as he handed the picture back to me.

And that was it. I was in! I walked without hesitation directly to the bar without looking left or right. The bartender nodded in my direction, “Whatcha have, butch?”

of such things and I was trying not to appear stunned.

Then the bartender grabbed my money, made change, and threw it in his tip jar.

I detected what I thought were women huddled around the small stage. I watched a man dressed in chaps come from a dark corner of the bar and put a dollar bill in the top of what I now know was a drag queen’s nylons.

I slugged down my beer and ordered another. It appeared I was going to have to wait until after the show before the women started trying to get me into their sexual grasp. After my third beer, and after the last drag queen, this time a Bette Midler impersonator, left the stage, I poised myself for the onslaught. None came. I was as invisible as a fly sitting on a fly swatter.

My mind reeled with possible explanations. There were women here who were not attached to anyone.

Why had they not come over? I wasn’t the cutest thing in the world but I certainly was as cute as some of the women whose arms were wrapped around other women’s shoulders.

Maybe that was it!? Maybe I was supposed to be the pursuer! I was dressed as the man after all. The very idea deflated me, so I ordered another beer. And then I ordered another. I slipped into a dazed depression as I realized I was way beyond my social capabilities.

This foreign land of gender-bending, and who says what to whom, and who does what to whom, and who takes out the trash and who does the dishes were beyond me and what was I doing trying to step into this unknown area of human nature any way?

I did end up having a conversation with a young boy about my age (had he used a picture of an old boyfriend to get in?) who promised to introduce me to his aunt if I came back next week. I left too drunk to drive and too depressed to care.

Of course, as fate would have it, the next week, my favorite lesbian patron began to return some of my clumsy flirtations with some expert statements and cautious flirtations of her own. It seems she and her lover had reached a rough spot. She handled this bump in the road the way a lot of young people do, both homosexual and heterosexual; she began to look for comfort elsewhere when her relationship began to slip toward the miserable.

For a moment, I panicked. So here I was after months of questions, questions and more questions, about to get some answers, answers, answers. From a real lesbian who, no doubt, knew exactly who does what to whom.

“What are you doing after work?” she asked me as I put her hamburger, extra mayo and sweet tea, no lemon on the table in front of her breasts. It was a Wednesday. Church night.

“Just going home.”

“No church?”

She smiled hesitantly and I interpreted that as respect for my religious confusion and her willingness to totally back off if I wanted her to. I did not want her to.

“Not tonight,” I said.

He called me butch!

Oh, the glory of first love!

I ordered a beer as offhandedly as I could manage, given the excitement of my victory, and looked around for the women I knew would be headed my way very soon. A woman in a long sequined dress was singing a Diana Ross song. I had just had the thought that she sounded so much like Diana Ross that she could be Diana Ross when I realized she was actually a man dressed like Diana Ross. My know-itall “at least bisexual” acquaintance had not told me

I learned that the new path of first love is strewn with soul-glitter. Newness. It was all new. I had not seen this kind of love on television. The few stories I had read in pulp fiction novels did not mirror two young women driving on hot southern nights through a small southern town singing Donna Summer songs and kissing beneath the shelter of the Live Oak tree.

I fell into her as though I had known her all my life.

Whatever the world, the churches, the rules said about

two women loving each other did not apply to us because they did not make any sense compared to this delight, this feeling of rightness. There was nothing more right than loving her.

The youth years of a young girl coming out and falling in love in a small southern town are full of glistening tales, but also dark lessons of people’s ignorance and fear. She has to explain herself, or she feels that she has to explain herself. She’s young and does not understand yet that explanations of how two women love each other are nobody’s business, that she does not need anyone’s permission. The internalized homophobia will rear its subtle influence for years to come until she finds her own resolve.

And then there is the whole God thing. How does a young woman who is a seeker of the spiritual and who is also a lesbian reconcile her relationship to God? It seemed like the first thing that needed to happen was for me to toss out everything I had been told that did not feel right to my spirit. I had to be honest and real and unflinching because I needed to be real sure that if I was going to give God up, it had to be because I was certain that God and my gender preference could not live harmoniously within me.

It is a private journey, this reconciling yourself with the spiritual. All the voices of religion and other people’s opinions about who God is and how the divine does or does not influence the happenings of our earthly plane must be sorted through. The fear of retribution and being kicked down the street if you step out of line must be put aside while the spirit within instructs on what is real and what is of man.

Working within the heavy cloud of a southern culture made my personal journey particularly cumbersome.

I was continuously burdened by daily reminders of how loving a woman was wrong, of how wrong I was, of how I had become an “abomination to God.” I quit going to church.

In my mind, giving up church was synonymous with giving up God. Of course, it wasn’t long before I discovered this was not true. The Divine has a way of sticking around even when a young lesbian feels like she must forgo all things divine in her attempt to discover her truth. I was one of the fortunate ones.

Coming out to yourself, falling in love for the first time, reconciling the spiritual with the accepted rules of religion, coming out to co-workers, friends and family and the watchful eyes of a small southern town can be perilous and frightening. I witnessed several women scurry back into the safe harbor of the heterosexual world. I made my own fatalistic segues back into the “normal” world of relationships with men, until I finally gave in and surrendered to my true nature. What a relief. And now I am left with the memories of me, as a young woman, breathing the humid air of her upbringing, making the first steps toward claiming her self, her God and her life, and being very happy with how it all worked out.

Vickie Spray is a Spiritual Mentor who assists others on their path of spiritual healing. She has inspired many with her own story of healing and reclamation. She can be reached at vickiespray@ yourlifeexpressions.com.

ASK

MARGEAUX Q: Do transsexuals believe in God?

A: People really do ask me that! Am I surprised?

No, I mean many people believe there is something inherently wrong with any person that does not believe in a god ….I wonder if there aren’t as many closeted atheists as gays or transsexuals…. so it follows to the normalcy police that anyone as “abnormal” as a trans person would not believe in a god. I’m not sure that my trans friends who are atheists don’t feel that two supposed abnormalities create normality as they go careening though life. Oh damn! I gave it away. Yes some transsexuals don’t believe in a god, but in no higher percentage than the rest of the population. I suggest that the transgender population mirrors the community at large. We make up are a very small percentage of the world but our viewpoints, ethnicity, color, sexual preference etc. run the gamut. We are Black, Caucasian, male, female, Asian, Eastern European, North American, atheist, Baptist, Muslim, Catholic, gay, straight, bi-sexual…. you name it…. but our atheist component makes up no larger a percentage than in any other community, ethnicity etc.

Questions like this do make me realize though that I still have a lot of “educatin” to do. This type of questioning cements in my mind that we as transgender people still have to prove ourselves as normal (whatever that is) on all levels and that we must be vigilant in standing up against the persecution and stereotyping that courses though the world. Atheists have jobs, kids, and go to school, as do transsexuals. Some atheists are transsexuals, some transsexuals are atheists. So what! The one thing that binds them and all the other groups mentioned is that they are human. No human being has a lock on Truth!

If you have a question for Margeaux, email her at branchingout@familytreecenter.org. Your question may be featured in the next issue of Branching Out or online at familytreecenter.org!

being discovered on the ocean floor - it is fascinating!

I think God intended for our lives to be a neverending journey of discovery, wonder, amazement.

We need to pursue it, go for it, reach for the stars; in other words, don’t play it safe - play hard. Perhaps a better goal than living a long life, is to just really live! The popular quote comes to mind as being true - “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”

The Bible describes two options for living - being safe or living life to the fullest. It says that “whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.” That means the moment we try to be safe, stay home and not get hurt, we have already lost. We can’t try to preserve this life, we just have to live it! Maybe you, like me, tried as a child to catch some fireflies and keep them alive in a jar. It doesn’t work, at least not for very long. We can’t preserve them to admire their shining glow anymore than we can enjoy the fullness of this life by isolating ourselves. To really live, you have to be willing to get out there and make a difference.

It is never too late to start living life, to enjoy the beauty God created around us, to make new friends, tackle a new project, stir up the dreams of youth you got too busy to pursue, ignite a fire in your heart to follow your passion and pursue your dreams.

Remember - Julia Child didn’t discover cooking until she was in her 40s, and her long-running show on PBS did not begin until she was 51. Susan Boyle never tried to pursue a singing career until age 48 when she appeared on Britain’s Got Talent. Roget created the Thesaurus at age 73, after he had retired.

Winston Churchill also used his retirement years to pick up a pen and write. It was then, in 1953, at the age of 79 that he won the Nobel Prize in literature.

So what are you waiting for? Make time this summer to discover the beauty God created. Start making vacation plans, go somewhere new, plan an adventure. Don’t sit home this summer - take a class, start a project, re-connect with old friends, make new friends. Get off the computer, get out of the house, and enjoy your life!! God gave you life, and Jesus came so that you could have a more abundant life.

Pursue it, go for it, live it!

Jeanne Murray leads F&M Worship, a group dedicated to having fellowship, music and worshiping God with Bible study and prayer every Wednesday.

It’s mid-week encouragement for the soul, and it’s open to anyone. For more information, visit www.FMWorship.com.

In Times of Harvest

Modern Pagans look to the past to find lessons for our present.

by River Fireheart and Diana Kampert • Special To Branching Out

Summer Living In Florida

by Jeanne Murray • Special To Branching Out

We enjoyed great weather in May, but as the calendar turns to June, it is heating up. So how will you fill these summer months? Trips to the beach, plans for vacations and getting out of town, or maybe getting together with friends for backyard barbecues, pool parties, kayaking on the river . . . the possibilities are endless. We are blessed living in Florida, surrounded by so much beauty. God created some pretty amazing places, and the world around us is just waiting to be discovered. There is more to this life than we can ever comprehend - unknown galaxies, new life forms

The first day of August marks the first of three Pagan harvest festivals and thus, the beginning of the harvest season. August 1st, known to many Pagans as Lughnasadh, is the cross-quarter date directly between the summer solstice (approx. June 21) and the fall equinox (approx. Sept. 22), and is honored as the grain harvest. Lughasadh is followed by Mabon (another name for the fall equinox), which celebrates the autumn harvest, and Samhain (October 31st), the final harvest.

As Pagans, we seek to honor the cycles of the Earth and align ourselves spiritually and metaphorically with the seasons. Though it may be easy to feel separate from nature in our modern world, the Continued pg 6

message of the season is all around us. It may not feel like it, but the daylight hours have already begun getting shorter; soon the trees will explode into shades of crimson and lose their leaves. The Earth offers up the fruits of the summer and the sun shines long into the night; but winter is not far away.

For our ancestors, the first harvest of the season was marked with joy and uncertainty, as failure of the crops so early in the season could be devastating. The harvest may not have the urgency for us as it did for our ancestors, but that does not make it less relevant. Today, as we move from our climate-controlled homes, to our mechanized cars, and purchase processed foods, grown on foreign continents at unseasonable times, from plastic refrigerated bins; it is easy to feel disconnected from the cycles of the Earth.

But from the harvest cycles come important lessons. As Pagans we remember that the fruits of the harvest are not reaped without labor. In modern Paganism, we celebrate the funeral of Tailtiu, the Celtic Earth Goddess who died of exhaustion while clearing the land for agriculture. We learn that dedication and effort are powerful tools in the achievement of the things which sustain us. We honor the spirit of the Harvest God, who becomes and embodies the grain which must be cut and threshed. We learn that no harvest is without sacrifice, and no growth or progress is made without loss. We know that the seed must shed its hull and be destroyed for the plant to grow. And we are ever mindful of the coming winter; we remember that no harvest is perpetual, and we should plan for the future.

For modern Pagans, this is the time for us to take stock of our lives. We consider where our seeds have been planted, and whether or not they grew as expected. We celebrate our personal harvests, and look ahead to see what parts of our lives may need additional tending before there will be any harvest to reap. We consider the parts of our lives that have been left fallow, and decide whether those barren fields should be reinvigorated or abandoned.

Removed as most of us are from agriculture, its processes – sowing, tending and reaping – surround us and permeate our lives in many ways. From the tangible food on our tables, to the metaphorical personal harvests, we have but to slow down and take notice. This season, we encourage you to open your hearts to the lessons of the Earth.

River Fireheart and Diana Kampert are officers of the Red Hills Pagan Council. For more information about Lughnasahd and other upcoming events, please visit www. redhillspagans.org.

Community Resource Directory Community Organizations •

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Pride Student Union PSU—FSU’s Lesbian/Gay/ Bisexual/Transgender Student Union 850-644-8804, www.fsu.edu/~sga/pride Youth Group A group for youth/teens 850-222-8555 youthgroup@familytreecenter.org Prime Timers A club for mature men over 21 850-877-4479, www.groups.yahoo.com/group/talprime Tallahassee Area Lesbian Moms rainbowshappen@lycos.com Big Bend Cares Support Group for HIV-positive members

Mondays, 7-8 , www.bigbendcares.org Healthline 211 (Telephone Counseling and Referral Service) Crisis intervention and referrals 24 hours a day, 850-224-NEED (850-224-6333) Refuge House Domestic Violence and Rape Crisis Center www.refugehouse.com, e-mail refuge.house@tallahassee.net 24 Hr Hotline: 850-681-2111, LGBT Program: 850-395-7631 Safe Zone Tallahassee, A program designed to identify people who consider themselves to be open to and knowledgeable about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered issues, 850-644-2003 Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), 850-597-2374 North Florida Lesbians Listserve: nfll@yahoogroups.com GLAAM: Gays, Lesbians and Allies Advancing Medicine - Florida State College of Medicine, GLAAM is a student group at FSU College of Medicine that promotes equality in healthcare. ­— jmo09@med.fsu.edu

Religious Support All Saints Catholic Community............................................................................656-3777 Gentle Shepherd Metropolitan Community Church...................................878-3001 Nichiren Buddhism (contact Carol)....................................................................878-8467 Quaker Meeting.......................................................................................................878-3620 St. Catherine of Siena (Catholic)..........................................................................421-0447 Unitarian Universalist Church.............................................................................385-5115 St. Stephen Lutheran Church..............................................................................385-2728 United Church in Tallahassee...............................................................................878-7385 Temple Israel.............................................................................................................877-3517 First Presbyterian Church of Tallahassee..........................................................222-4505 Lake Jackson United Methodist Church 4223 North Monroe Street...................................................................................562-1759

Submit your organization for the resource directory! Email staff@familytreecenter.org or call (850) 222-8555

Tallahassee Prime Timers parties, monthly dinners and weekly happy hours PrimeTimersWW.org/talprime

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Please support the businesses that support your community!

A social group for mature men, featuring gatherings, house

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RETURN SERVICE REQUESTED The Family Tree P.O. Box 38477 Tallahassee, FL 32315

October 14, 2011 Monroe Street Conference Center 2714 Graves Road (Former Marie Livingston’s)

Sponsorships Available contact

gala@familytreecenter.org Tickets go on sale and nominations for the Community Choice Awards will be accepted beginning August 16TH. www.familytreecenter.org

TALLAHASSEE, FL PERMIT NO. 87

PAID

NON PROFIT ORG US POSTAGE