http://www.drawger.com/zinasaunders/ Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:10:04 EDT FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://drawger.com/_images/drawger_leo_logo.gif http://www.drawger.com/zinasaunders http://www.drawger.com/zinasaunders/index.php?section=articles&article_id=10015

Bridget and Angie had been a couple for about 15 years when they decided to add their son Harper to their loving home.  It wasn’t a decision they arrived at lightly and it’s expanded their world in ways they hadn’t imagined. This is the sixth installment in my series, Love and Marriage, interviewing and painting long standing same-sex couples. To see the rest of the series so far, visit the Gallery I have here. Bridget: I was always gay. I was in the theater when I was a kid, so a lot of the people around me were gay and my friends were always gay. I thought it was cool to be gay, in the circles that I was traveling in. But sometimes I’ll notice same-sex couples walking down the street holding hands and it’s still a little awkward for me; even me, I’ll go, “Oh look, two women!” I don’t know if I want people to go, “Oh look, two women,” about us. We do hold hands, but sometimes I’ll feel a little uncomfortable. In New York it’s easier, but when we go to Jersey to the supermarket , I change a little bit, I wouldn’t hold her hand at the A&P, in Metuchen or whatever, you know what I mean? Although I should, because then they'd say, “Oh, look, they're normal!” Angie: It’s been a fun experience with my niece and nephew, who are four and six years old. We’re like their second parents, and the six year old has started asking questions, like he asked his mom if he could marry his best friend Angelo. And she said, “Of course, you can marry anyone you want to, Love.” My niece, who was four, was playing in the bathtub with two little whale toys, and she was saying, “You're the baby and I'm the mommy and this is the other mommy.” She was playing a whole game with two mommies. Bridget: We have a little circle of friends with kids who are the same age as Harper, and the women are Angie’s age, 37, 36. It’s really cool, we're treated very naturally, we're very accepted. Angie: There are so many more people who are out and kids are reading about so-and-so being gay. There wasn’t a gay organization when I was a kid in high school ... I didn’t know anyone gay in high school, at least not that I knew of. Bridget: It used to be really different. When I was first out there and going to bars and clubs, the dykey women thought women like me weren't being gay enough, because we didn’t scream it. I had my share of flannel shirts, but they didn’t look good on me! There are dykes and there are a lot of women who you wouldn’t know are gay. I went through a little period of time when I didn’t want to be associated with dykes, because they’d all think I was a dyke, and I wasn’t a dyke, I was a gay woman. Why couldn’t I be gay? Why did I have to be a lesbian? The word lesbian has no sense of humor. I was so much happier being gay. I never define myself as being a lesbian. Angie’s a doula and she has a couple of same-sex parents, and two are very gung-ho lesbians. I want equal rights, I don't want to have to keep going down to get fingerprinted and paying all this money so I can adopt my little boy. Angie: I always wanted to have kids. We spoke about adopting, but childbirth is such a beautiful part of being a female that I wanted to experience it. Bridget: I liked the idea of it, but growing up, it wasn't a big dream – I wanted to be a star. But I also would say to myself, “When I have a kid, he'll behave better than that one,” that kind of thing, so it was in my head. Angie: Some of the issues we faced were needing to decide about whether to go with a known donor or an anonymous donor. We didn’t have any immediate friends that were candidates – a lot of our friends are HIV positive, so that wasn’t going to work. We had one friend who is a very good friend, but he also wanted to be a dad. And we discussed it and we didn’t really want the dad in the picture, because I didn’t want to take away from Bridget’s role. Also maybe because of movies, I didn’t want that dad’s family to come back at any point and take the child away from us. Bridget: We had the opportunity to make it so that the child would be ours and I figured when he gets older there's going to be so many people out there that are going to have two mommies or two daddies, that it’s not going to be that enormous of a question as it would have been 30 years ago. We've decided to say that his dad was a really generous man who wanted us to be able to be together as a family, and that we were lucky to get him. Angie: Being out has been so much easier for me since we’ve had Harper, because I feel like we had to make so many choices and decisions through the process of deciding to have a child: every procedure, every time we had to sign a piece of paper, we had to re-choose in that moment, do we really want to have a child? It was a recommitment for me. It’s a recommitment to the relationship. Having to do that so many times, if somebody wants to question our love for each other, then it’s … poor you, you should be ashamed. We didn’t meet in a bar and the next morning wake up and I was pregnant, you know what I mean? It was a real conscious choice and we clearly have thought about this and our relationship very hard and had to do a lot of work in order to get to this point. Bridget: Angie's sister always says, “I wish I had a wife!” Because she and her husband have a typical husband/wife relationship – there is a mother and a father, and there really isn’t that distinction with us. The only difference is that Angie can breastfeed. Angie: When we were setting up the baby room, my sister said, “Wow, I just realized, when I want to get new dishes, I just go buy them, but you can’t do that, because Bridget needs to have a say in it. It's really two women. Chuck wouldn’t even notice that the dishes were changed for a week! But you couldn’t just go buy a set of glasses, because Bridget would want to have input in it.” Bridget: I really believe that gay couples are closer to each other than heterosexual couples. Angie: I think that depends on the relationship, because I’ve seen many relationships that I work with – and being a doula, I get to see them pretty intimately in a birthing scenario – and I don’t know if we're all closer. Bridget: Maybe not closer, but I think there's a lot of stuff that we’re so similar about that things go without being said. Even little things. Angie: Yes, like not having to explain that you need alone time, or bathroom time or whatever. Bridget: I really feel like we’re best friends, besides being married and lovers. I can’t understand how anyone could come into our house and say that we shouldn’t be married.

]]> Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:48:08 EDT http://www.drawger.com/zinasaunders/index.php?section=articles&article_id=9978

Here are a couple of pieces from the past few days, the first of Mosab Hassan Yousef, author of Son of Hamas. He was a high ranking member of Hamas who spied for the Israelis for years, code named The Green Prince by his Israeli handlers. Here's a link to the story.   And this one, below, is in today's paper, of Chinese film maker Jia Zhangke, who began his career doing his movies under the Chinese government's radar. Here's a link to the article, Changing China From Within.



]]> Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:02:44 EDT http://www.drawger.com/zinasaunders/index.php?section=articles&article_id=9952

Now that the 100 Heads for Haiti website is up, here’s a link. In case you don’t know already, 100% of the proceeds will be donated to Doctors Without Borders, so take a look at the line-up and plan your purchases.

]]> Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:09:07 EDT http://www.drawger.com/zinasaunders/index.php?section=articles&article_id=9922

Bob and Christopher, who have been together since 1991, relish the relative normality of their lives. It’s a long way from the way it was just 25 years ago, and they still seek equal rights under the law.   This is the fifth installment in my series, Love and Marriage, interviewing and painting long standing same-sex couples. To see the rest of the series so far, visit the Gallery I have here. Bob: We got together in ’91, when we were on the road in South Pacific. I’m a violinist and Christopher is an actor. In the theater, most people are very outgoing, but those of us in the pit can be a little quieter, so it’s a bit like two different worlds. Backstage I’d see him harassing everybody in the dressing rooms, teasing and bantering back and forth, and he won me over: I found him very entertaining! And it was fun, sitting in the pit, to look up on stage and see him playing Lieutenant Buzz Adams flying in on his jet plane as we were sawing away down there. Christopher: After doing the South Pacific tour, we then toured with Kiss Me Kate. So we were still traveling around the country and certain states or towns were not gay friendly at all, and we were aware that by being in the same bed we were breaking laws. Bob: It wasn’t that long ago. A few years ago when I was in Cincinnati on a tour, we were there for a few weeks and there were all these demonstrations right in downtown Cincinnati, about how we’re going to burn in Hell and there was this whole, “Fags! Gays! Burn in Hell!” right at the theater where we were performing. It was 2004, around the presidential election, right before Bush was about to be reelected, so things were pretty charged, especially in Ohio. I’m really not that thick-skinned and I find it frustrating and upsetting that there would be people out there who feel this way about us and our relationship and yet they don’t even know us. A lot of people use religion as a way to say the Bible says this and that. In my mind they pick and choose what to believe. Of course, it’s their religion and this is a free country and I think that they do have a right to believe that. But I don’t see why they feel they have the right to deny us equality. Christopher: It doesn’t impact their day-to-day life, so what does it matter to them? Bob: We think about that kind of stuff a lot. I mean, what if something should happen to us, if one of us ends up in the hospital, in terms of visiting or getting in there? All it takes is for somebody who has another agenda to say, “No, you can’t see each other, you don’t have that right.” What do we do? Even with a Civil Union, we have to carry around a piece of paper, which I’m told in other places, like New Jersey, doesn’t always work. And not having the support of the community is also very frustrating. As a violinist, I’ve played at a lot of weddings in my day, and I’ve heard marriage vows many times. When the congregation and the people in attendance are asked if they will support this couple, I think how there are people out there actively trying to rip Chris and me apart; I just don’t get it. I don’t see how our relationship impacts their lives. Christopher: I used to work with a woman who had four children from three different men, and that was fine, she got health care for her kids and whoever she was with at the time. I still can’t get Bob on my health insurance and I’ve been with my company for a long time. Bob: I have the musicians union health insurance, and thankfully the musicians union would let Chris on, which was great, but his plan is much better and I still have to buy my own hospitalization. It doesn’t really make sense. I met with some members of our State legislature staff, back in 2006, up in Putnam County where our house is, speaking about this very issue, about marriage equality, and I remember an official saying, “Well, for a couple of thousand dollars, you can draw up some legal documents and stuff,” and I’m thinking, “But why should I have to spend a couple of thousand to try to protect myself?” It doesn’t seem fair to me, and when I pushed this -- and this was not our State senator, but it was by someone in his office -- I was told, “Maybe you should move to Massachusetts.” Christopher: Bob’s very politically active. I am, too: that’s all I watch on TV and all the websites I go to are political websites, but he’s actually treasurer of Putnam County Democrats. Bob: In some ways Chris is much more politically aware than I am, especially nationally. He follows a lot more of the news and can name this representative from Michigan and that one and this one, and I kind of get lost. I tend to be much more involved locally; I’m fairly involved with the Democrats there, mostly because I do believe in the Democratic party’s values and the core principles even if they shouldn’t be discriminating against people like us. But I also like to think that things will change, that it’s a generational issue. Younger people tend to have much less of a problem with gay marriage and tend to be very supportive of it. It’s frustrating feeling like we still have so little, but then I think back to 1980, when we were coming out, and how very different it was then. I mean, I wouldn’t have even thought of the possibility of gay marriage; I was just hoping for some tolerance and maybe a place at the table. Christopher: And that we weren’t going to get beat up when we walked down the street. Bob: I remember when Clinton was elected, I was just frankly thrilled that he got up there and talked about gay rights and made us human. He acknowledged us, that we exist and we’re people and we have rights -- Reagan never said anything and he swept the whole AIDS thing under the carpet for so long. So as angry as people might get with Clinton for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and DOMA [Defense of Marriage Act], I think he made some huge changes by just including us in the dialogue. I guess what I would love people to know is that we are just like other people, and that we care – we don’t only care about the Gay Agenda. To me, there are as many gay agendas as there are gay people. That’s what frustrated me most when I was coming out and I’d read things that said you have to live in the gay ghetto, in the Village, that you need The Gay Community ... that was probably the reality of the time, but it isn’t now and I think it’s great to be able to be just another person involved in your community. I’m involved with many organizations, but it’s more local stuff, upstate, because I care deeply about the environment there. Whether we direct the local theater or are involved in politics, we want to be active and move things forward. We both feel strongly about that.

]]> Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:35:26 EDT http://www.drawger.com/zinasaunders/index.php?section=articles&article_id=9884

I’ve been enjoying working in my digital woodcut style more and more, but I wasn’t always a digital dame. My first woodcut was back in high school; my school entered it in some kind of national scholarship thing (I can’t remember the name of it, maybe the Natl. Scholastic Awards or something like that?) and it won. I was amazed and proud. But I didn’t keep it up. Decades passed, with my attention entirely focused on painting and pen and ink. In the late ‘90s, when i first started going digital, I developed my digital woodcut style which I’ve used occasionally since then and which I used in the Darwin book I did last year. Out of that grew the more serious woodcut stuff I’ve been doing lately. One of the things I like best about working in this style is that I can be less literal than when I paint. I’m not sure if that’s just a feeling or it’s a fact, but it’s the way it’s going for me now.











]]> Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:03:03 EDT http://www.drawger.com/zinasaunders/index.php?section=articles&article_id=9810

One of the best things about Drawger is the friendships I’ve made, and one of the closest of those is with Frances Jetter. Drawger also sparked my series of profiles of illustrators, and I’ve always felt it wasn’t quite complete without Frances, a deficiency I’m finally remedying. “My family worked in factories and my grandfather was a clothing workers union organizer. After I became an illustrator and was working for The Nation, he told me that around 1910 he spilled acid on cloth in shops that were open seven days a week. We are very pro-union in my family. “When I was in high school I saw an issue of Ramparts at a friend’s house, with an article about Napalm in Viet Nam, and the first political piece I ever did was a portrait of a Vietnamese mother and baby. This was during the Viet Nam war. “I didn’t want to go to a collegey-type place -- that was my protest -- so I went to Parsons for graphic design, not really knowing what graphic design was. “The teacher that had the most influence on me, in the first year there, considered graphic design to be a mixture of illustration and problem solving. So it wasn’t the corporate-identity type thing --that didn’t interest me -- it was about coming up with ideas. Sometimes I built things and sometimes I did linoleum cuts, or other kinds of prints, but anything was welcome. We also worked with type, and I got to like type then, but I really liked solving problems with images. “Later on, I majored in photography, because the photography teacher, Larry Fink, was the most interesting person and did the most interesting work. Then I studied with his teacher, Lisette Model, at the New School. She was very old then and she was very scary: very tiny and terrifying. She was ferocious. Really a unique person and tough and interesting. “At one point I had a work study job involving taking pictures in prisons and mental hospitals. It was for an organization called Hospital Audiences which sent the entertainment to institutions. They sent good entertainment to the prisons and some ridiculous entertainment to the mental hospitals; they sent Charles Mingus to the Queen’s House of Detention. They were actually very afraid of what might happen with some of the prison  audiences, because they didn’t have enough guards there, so they weren’t going to send them anyone boring. “But for the mental hospitals ... I remember a performance where dancers had nude body suits on ... a really pretentious piece. “I was supposed to take pictures of the audiences as they watched the performances, but then somebody  in charge of the volunteers said, ‘You could end up here as easily as any of the people -- any of us could -- and would you like your picture taken here?’ “That got in the way of my taking pictures. Not just there, but in general, because it’s capturing someone when he or she may not want to be captured. I don’t view it as something wrong, but I started to think it was questionable to photograph a person in a mental hospital. And I missed  drawing also, I guess, so I didn’t follow photography. “I started to focus on linoleum cuts when I was showing my work around -- this was when you could still get appointments with art directors -- and one of the art directors selected one of my linoleum cut prints and said, That would show up best in my magazine. So I was hired for that place. “I don’t know at what point I decided I wanted to work for The New York Times to do editorial work. I worked with the Book Review for awhile, which was pleasurable, but I really wanted hardcore political things. I was also working for the Ideas and Trends section of the Week in Review, which were softer articles. I think that’s the kind of things women were given. “In my head, you could be one of the boys if you did the hardcore political things. Now I see that there was probably more freedom in some of the softer pieces. “I didn’t want interference from a very young age. I thought it was a right not to have what you do interfered with, in any way. I don’t know where I got that from, but I thought that making these pictures was the best thing to do with your life. I was very bothered by even tiny interferences – I wanted my things to be left alone. “I think I always had the feeling that it’s Us against Them, that it’s workers against management, and that management is the bad guys and that things aren’t equal. “What I liked about editorial work is that I could make the subject matter my own and that I pick parts that I could relate to. The whole idea of playing with things and turning them upside down and finding what the article really meant ... plus the reading part was always the most fun. “I spent lot of time reading the encyclopedia and I’d see if there were words or images in the reference material; that part was just delightful. And then playing with things and seeing the connections; when you’re really looking and you’re not nervous, you see how things connect to one another. “By reading those articles, I became more interested in politics and social issues. I guess I’ve always been sort of angry or aggressive or looking for a fight and I think that fit in well with some of the political subject matter. For me it was having  some  feeling for  the underdog as well as being somebody who is pissed off and rebelling because someone else is in control. “I’d use up all the time doing sketches. I could go through one and a half pads of tracing paper doing sketches, trying to get the expression on the face and in the hands just right. At a certain point, if I’d been up all night, I’d decide, ‘Well, this has to do,’ because the piece was due in a few hours.                           “Sometimes, when I handed in an illustration after being up the whole night, I’d be up the next night thinking of what should have been done with the color or what could have been better and really feeling miserable about it. And agonizing over it when it was in print. “And then if it was something that was killed, then I’d be more in love with it than ever, because it would be like this dead thing that wasn’t realized or appreciated. If too many people like one of  my pieces, I’m immediately suspicious. “It’s different now that I’m doing almost no illustration or what I’m doing is not for a client; whether you call it fine art or illustration, I don’t really need to define that. But I’m doing it without someone interfering. “I just finished a book about torture. It’s called Cry Uncle. It was largely based on what went on at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and some secret CIA prisons. It’s a picture book with some words in it. It’s a large format book -- the images are 18 by 24 -- and it’s hand printed. It has letter-pressed type; the type mattered to me as much as the images, as well as how the book itself how looked and felt. “I wanted the paper to feel like skin on the cover. It’s got the words done in letter press, pressed in, and the paper is sort of fleshy looking and wrinkled, it’s paper from Nepal, and it looks like skin. Some of the other papers are from banana leaves and there’s something very much like human skin about the paper. “The paper is also translucent, so you see everything that has come before, when you’re looking at the pages. It’s in an accordion fold -- and unraveled, about 40 feet long. “It’s a very interpretive book, it’s based on what they did and my visceral reaction to it, because what they did was so appalling. In most cases they had a list of things they could do to the prisoner that wouldn’t leave physical scars, but it was intended to make somebody crazy. It’s not like they could even get information out of somebody after this kind of torture. “Some of the descriptions of what they did were so disgusting that I’d realize that I was making the face myself, of someone who is being victimized. I think to get the feeling into the piece, you have to be reacting to what’s going on in it. “In working on the book, there was a weird mixture of feeling disgusted over what went on and feeling really excited about making the pieces. I’ve always felt a little bit of guilt about that, because I was always doing things about tragedies and wars and illnesses. “I love the idea of doing books. I’m planning another book that I started even before this one. But in between I’m going to be working on some other things. We’ll see.“ To see more illustrator portaits and interviews in the series, visit the Art Talks Gallery here.

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