-
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Witch Spittle
Photo by Sue Hardesty By Lee Lynch
Oh, yes, we had fun this year decorating for Halloween. For a couple of hours, I didn’t once think about the ghouls in D.C.
We don’t get trick or treaters here, but we have a lively neighborhood of adults from 55 to 95, ourselves included, who get a kick out of holiday trappings. Our plastic Frankenstein mat screeches bloody murder when we open or close the garage door. Half the time we scare—and laugh—ourselves silly.
It had been many full moons since we last dragged out our spooky paraphernalia. My sweetheart exhumed it from the treasure chest that is our garage and instructed me to decide what should go where. Me? Organize? The prospect was scarier than an army of menacing phantoms.
I somehow coped.
-
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Witch Spittle
Photo by Sue Hardesty By Lee Lynch
Oh, yes, we had fun this year decorating for Halloween. For a couple of hours, I didn’t once think about the ghouls in D.C.
We don’t get trick or treaters here, but we have a lively neighborhood of adults from 55 to 95, ourselves included, who get a kick out of holiday trappings. Our plastic Frankenstein mat screeches bloody murder when we open or close the garage door. Half the time we scare—and laugh—ourselves silly.
It had been many full moons since we last dragged out our spooky paraphernalia. My sweetheart exhumed it from the treasure chest that is our garage and instructed me to decide what should go where. Me? Organize? The prospect was scarier than an army of menacing phantoms.
I somehow coped.
-
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: There Is No Place Like Home
Photo by Sue Hardesty By Lee Lynch
I was recently contemplating my shoes, which, along with clothes and boxes of books, are the only closeted things in our home.
That morning I’d noticed my sweetheart had attached a magnet depicting Dorothy’s ruby shoes to our back door. Now, I’m as big a fan of The Wizard of Oz as the next gay person, but those shoes were never particularly significant to me. Which might be because, as a little kid, I read and reread the 1903 edition of The Wizard of Oz handed down to me from my considerably older brother and, perhaps, from my father before him. The inscription from Grandma and Grandpa Lynch is: “To read on train to North Dakota. March, 1939.”
-
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: What?
By Lee Lynch
The Amazon Trail
Photo by Sue Hardesty When I first put in the hearing aids, I felt a giant exhalation of tension. Though I knew of my relatively modest hearing loss, I was unaware what a strain it put not just on my marriage and public life, but on my mind and body.
Grandpa Lynch, a retired Railroad Engineer, had big clunky hearing aids. Grandma Lynch needed a pair, though her family said she could hear perfectly well when she wanted to. There was definitely hearing loss on my mother’s side, but her parents couldn’t have afforded hearing aids if they’d wanted them, which they didn’t any more than Grandma Lynch did.
Shame was attached to the very idea of needing such devices. Do people reject hearing aids out of pride? Vanity? Was it the stigma of disability? Maybe back then the new-fangled things weren’t very effective. Probably they were uncomfortable.
-
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Remember Summer?
Photo by Sue Hardesty By Lee Lynch
The Amazon Trail: Remember Summer?I mean serious summer. When the season was all fireflies and sandcastles, ice cream trucks and taking the train to visit relatives for two whole weeks. It was hours of reading, amusement parks, and hitting tennis balls against the apartment building next door for hours. It was the public swimming pool and cool sheets for sunburns and the ice cream truck. It was freedom.
I’m not exactly sure what happened, or at what age summertime was stolen away, but it sure ain’t what it used to be.
I am not a social person and I don’t have the energy I had when I played vigorous games of handball (with myself) at the P.S. 20 playground once school let out in June. These days, an interview fries me. My summer started with 3 of them in two weeks. The interviewers were terrific and the subjects dear to my heart. In one of them, I talked with Natasha Frost about what pulp novels meant to us: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lesbian-pulp-fiction-ann-bannon.
-
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: A Poem and a Plant
Photo by Sue Hardesty By Lee Lynch
The Amazon Trail: A Poem and a PlantThe day was typical for the Pacific Northwest. The brightening sky had stopped sputtering its fine dewdrops for the moment, the wind had blown itself out, and the development where I live came to life. People took advantage of the disappearing dreariness to walk their dogs, scurry to our centrally located mailboxes, or meet their step goals.
I dropped off a copy of New York Magazine in the common room. The cover quoted Melissa Shusterman, who’s running for the Pennsylvania state legislature. “My 16-year-old turned to me after the election and he said, ‘America doesn’t want a smart, qualified woman in office.’ By Friday, I was running.”
-
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: A Poem and a Plant
Photo by Sue Hardesty By Lee Lynch
The Amazon Trail: A Poem and a PlantThe day was typical for the Pacific Northwest. The brightening sky had stopped sputtering its fine dewdrops for the moment, the wind had blown itself out, and the development where I live came to life. People took advantage of the disappearing dreariness to walk their dogs, scurry to our centrally located mailboxes, or meet their step goals.
I dropped off a copy of New York Magazine in the common room. The cover quoted Melissa Shusterman, who’s running for the Pennsylvania state legislature. “My 16-year-old turned to me after the election and he said, ‘America doesn’t want a smart, qualified woman in office.’ By Friday, I was running.”
-
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: The Terlet
Photo by Sue Hardesty The Amazon Trail
By Lee LynchWhen I objected, starting around the age of four or five, to commercials on the radio, I had no idea what the future of marketing would hold for us all. Why, I asked, was “The Lone Ranger” interrupted to sell Silvercup Bread? Was it because of his silver bullets? Well, yes, it was considered a terrific marketing tie-in. I hated ads then and I hate them now when the once open internet has become a mammoth shopping mall for which we pay with our privacy.
-
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: The Six-Foot Table Solution
Photo by Sue Hardesty By Lee Lynch
The Amazon TrailYes, we can solve all our problems with six-foot tables, even world peace.
I’m surprised no one thought of it before. It was my fairy goddaughter (FGD) who opened my eyes to the concept. She, also a writer, was the one who designated me her fairy godmother, in my opinion a great honor.
She was in the process of moving into her new house and a little bit overwhelmed. Or perhaps scared silly at the gargantuan task ahead. All her possessions were in a jumble. Like most of us landing in a new home, she didn’t know where to start.
-
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Zipline Vegas
[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_image admin_label=”Image” src=”http://www.markmcnease.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Wide-lgbtsr-600×164.jpg” show_in_lightbox=”off” url=”http://www.markmcnease.com/lgbtsr/” url_new_window=”on” use_overlay=”off” animation=”off” sticky=”off” align=”left” force_fullwidth=”off” always_center_on_mobile=”on” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”] [/et_pb_image][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row admin_label=”Row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]
Photo by Sue Hardesty Guest Column
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Zipline VegasIn the end, it’s all about ego. I’ll do almost anything, apparently, to protect my ego from being bruised.
She’s going on a zipline in Las Vegas. That’s what my sweetheart announced this morning. It gets worse. She said the zipline goes over city streets and buildings—and here I was envisioning a sweet pastoral zip across raging river rapids and sharp rocks. Now I only have to worry about her colliding with concrete, metal, and glass. Head first. Seems you have options; she plans zip to belly down, like a diving bird, a Peregrine falcon perhaps, which can reach speeds up to 200 mph.
She concocted this scheme with our friend Heather, who lives in Vegas and knows all the cool things to do. I have a feeling this trip will be a lot different than the one I took to the Lambda Literary Conference back in the early 1990s.
-
Guest Column: Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail – Regrets, I Have a Few
Photo by Sue Hardesty Guest Column by Lee Lynch
The Amazon Trail
Regrets, I Have a FewLuncheonette. Darn it all, I just found the word I was looking for back in 2007 when I set a scene in a coffee shop in New York. It wasn’t a coffee shop, it was a luncheonette. In that era, you could use the term coffee shop, but a reader might picture a Greenwich Village or a North Beach San Francisco dive that served espresso to long-haired women and men in berets. In my novel Beggar of Love, I wanted to evoke elbows on the counter, ham sandwiches and steaming cups of joe.
Telling my sweetheart about this, she popped out with, “My Beautiful Luncheonette.” We laughed, because of the 1985 gay male film “My Beautiful Laundrette.” I immediately thought I could write a short story about a luncheonette, but I don’t have enough time left to write a story about every word I fall in love with, not to mention I already wrote Dusty’s Queen of Hearts Diner.
-
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: The Eclipse Is Coming! The Eclipse Is Coming! (Guest Column)
Photo by Sue Hardesty Many thanks to Lee Lynch for allowing me to share her monthly Amazon Trail column. – Mark
By Lee Lynch
In North America, the total eclipse of the sun starts here. It’s Woodstock for everyone. Local and state governments are doing their best to avert chaos. Everyone in law enforcement and emergency services will be either on duty or on standby, many sleeping where they’re stationed because it’s projected that traffic will be at or near a standstill. The national park up the road, which might normally see 400 to 500 visitors at a time, is expecting 2,000 to 5,000 all at once. They’ll be limiting the number of vehicles allowed in to protect the fragile natural treasure and its wildlife.
The National Guard will be deployed.
-
Lee Lynch’s ‘Rainbow Gap’ Wins Ann Bannon Popular Choice Award at Golden Crown Literary Society Conference
Photo by Sue Hardesty It couldn’t happen to a nicer person, or a better author! Lee Lynch’s latest, Rainbow Gap (Bold Strokes Books) was just awarded the Ann Bannon Popular Choice Award at the Golden Crown Literary Society conference. You can read Lee’s monthly Amazon Trail as guest columns right here).
Lee Lynch is a trailblazer, multiple award winner, and the namesake of the Golden Crown Literary Society’s annual Lee Lynch Classic Award.