Friday, December 17, 2010

Busy Week for Research

Related Posts with ThumbnailsI'm searching for a good recipe to make a crispy thin crust pizza.  I've been following some of the recipes in the "Pioneer Woman Cooks" by Ree Drummond.  Her recipes are very down home comfort food. My next recipe from the book will be homemade chicken pot pie.

While I was at the library, I saw a book called "Gay Bar". Now I have sister named Gay, so the word doesn't always mean what it means to most people to me. This is a book about a woman, Helen P. Branson who owned a gay men's bar in the 1950's.  She also wrote a book about the bar (which is now out of print)  at a time when being gay was very taboo, if not illegal.  Will Fellows, found the book and decided to add his input along with what Helen wrote.  I found his writing to be too technical and repetitive so I skipped his very wordy sections and read only Helen's.  Her writing style is not polished, more like reading a letter from your great aunt but you can tell what she wrote is what she thought.  What I found so interesting about the story was not only how brave this  straight woman was to open a gay bar during a very anti-gay time but also how she saw a need and marketed it. 
Up until the late 1960's it was illegal for Asians to marry outside of their race.  This law passed in the early days of  California to control the cheap labor coming in from Asian countries.  It was thought at the time if the Asian immigrants could not marry and start a family, they would not stay.  The same arguments made about gay marriages today were made about interracial marriage back then. When my husband and I got married in 1981, it was only twenty years early we could not have.  It was a blue law (on the books but not enforced) for many years but it still was illegal.

2 comments:

Susan Raihala said...

Interesting book. It still amazes me how the human race seems hard-wired to create categories and erect barriers between them, with moral judgments overlaid pretty randomly. It's still amazing that it's been less than a century since women won the right to vote. Having grown up in the southern USA, I've seen institutional and cultural racism at its insidious work and fought against it in college classrooms in Alabama and Georgia. I've also had a number of gay friends (who WERE gay and not making "lifestyle" choices), helped a same-sex couple adopt a baby, and voted against the ban on gay marriages in Ohio. Really? We had to vote on that? It's just so sad.

Lydia Fiedler said...

I am stunned. You taught me something today.