Once I Had a Not-So-Secret Love

By Joan Opyr, 10-11-06

Fall is upon us. The weather has turned chilly, the days are getting short, and everywhere, Idaho lesbians are defying national stereotypes and loading up to shoot Bambi. And Feline. And Bambi’s father, his mother, his grandparents -- the whole extended Bambi family. Some of us are hoping to shoot Uncle Buck. We have tacky dreams of tacky antler chandeliers and tacky horned hat racks. We are the lesbian hunters of Great White North. Look out, Doug and Bob MacKenzie.

Others -- the lesbians with the really big guns -- have elk tags. Since moving to Idaho fourteen years ago, I have skinned and gutted three elk. True, I didn’t shoot any of them myself, but dear reader, that’s only because I caught buck fever and missed. I saw the racks on those Papas, and visions of winning my very own Boone and Crockett danced like a sugarplum in my head.

Is this any way for a dedicated, lifelong, owns-her-own-tool belt, card-carrying lesbian to behave? If she lives in Nothern Idaho, it is.

Let me try to explain my hometown of Moscow to you. This is a small, progressive college town -- a friendly, liberal oasis in a statewide sea of Republican red. Moscow is home to the University of Idaho. We have an active community theater. We’ve teamed up with Pullman, just across the border, to create a Washington Idaho Symphony. We have a Farmer’s Market, an Arts Commission, a Human Rights Task Force, several active civic organizations, and a Moscow Food Co-Op. The latter is the most important gathering spot in town. It’s where Moscow’s progressives meet, greet, and eat.

And what do we eat at the Co-Op? Tofu, of course. Marinated tofu. Barbecued tofu. Tofu whipped up with a bit of coconut flavoring and all natural cane syrup, spooned into a wheat-free, gluten-free, flavor-free pie shell, then covered in toasted cat hairs and marketed as a substitute for coconut cream pie. It’s a little slice of hell.

But Moscow’s progressives are not all vegans. We’re not all vegetarians. The Food Co-Op sells organic chickens, beef, and elk. They sell fresh eggs and organic milk, and the Co-Op deli serves the best grilled turkey and avocado sandwich, topped with spicy mustard, that you could ever hope to find. It’s a meat-eaters’ paradise. And out in the Food Co-Op parking lot, what will you find? Come hunting season, you’ll find Volvos with gun racks.

That, to me, sums up the Moscow way of life. We have to be contrary. We have to be different. This is our moral imperative, and I think it goes a long way toward explaining why our lesbians -- the Latin term is, I believe, Idaho Dykeus Specificus -- have the requisite number of dogs and cats (thirty-six); drive Volvos and Subarus; listen to Melissa Etheridge and Ani DiFranco; and, in short, do all of the right, just, and expected lesbian things, but for one month a year, when deer season opens, we blow the national curve (and also Curve) because we like tender, juicy venison, big antlers, and smooth buckskins.

Oh, those buckskins! I want a full set, brain-tanned, soft, and covered with fringe, just like Doris Day wore in Calamity Jane. Northern Idaho is the only place I could wear buckskins with a straight (well, sort of) face; the only place where I wouldn’t turn heads, at least not in a bad way. Leather gear and Guatemalan hand-knitted ponchos pass side by side on the streets here and no one bats an eyelid. If you can’t be yourself Moscow, you can’t be yourself anywhere.

I’ve visited and lived in would be lesbian paradises: Yellow Springs, Ohio, for example. Try finding a turkey sandwich there. Try just asking for turkey. You’d better be pretty quick on the draw. “No, I said Tofurkey, honest!” Otherwise, it’s the tar -- made from naturally gathered tree sap -- and the feathers -- from happy, free range birds -- for you.

I’m a gun-toting, liberal, progressive, lesbian Democrat and, no, I don’t support the NRA. I think they’re a bunch of nuts. But I do like to hunt, and that’s one of the many reasons I leave in Backend, Idaho and not Provincetown, San Francisco, or anywhere near the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival -- well, that and the fact that I prefer The Ramones to Cris Williamson.

Ducking and running for cover as the tofu flies!
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