Google First and Get Mad Later
Before you go into battle for a cause, large or very personal, you might want to research whether the fight has already been won.
Last night, a young friend stopped by with her new friend. The new pal was a vintage movie lover, like me, so we took off on old films.
The young woman spoke of a vintage film festival she had attended. I anticipated a typically childlike conversation between old movie fans: "You liked that? Me, too! You saw that one? Me, too! Whee!"
Instead, the woman twisted her face into an angry fist.
The organizers of the film festival had marketed to her the idea that the subject of the festival, a woman I knew to be an accomplished, recognized, lavishly awarded, rich woman of American film, had not been properly acknowledged because she was a Lesbian.
Absurdly, she said that in the woman's time (the 1920s to the 1950s) the studio moguls "didn't want the public to know that she had made all of those films."
Then why had the money men invested in her at all? And for decades? And why were she and the films heaped with awards?
In short, my young guest was prepared to do battle over a very particular fight that had been won 50 years before. This Hollywood woman lived openly and joyously, produced fantastic work, and lived a long, financially secure life with her partner in their beautiful seaside home.
The film festival organizers either hadn't done their homework, or had yellow-highlighted the prejudice the woman had encountered without mentioning how brilliantly the woman had overcome it. They did it just to needlessly piss off young women, and in so doing, they denied young Lesbians a glorious part of their heritage. When you're young, pissed is so much more accessible than pride. And heaven knows, it's trendier.
It broke my heart to see her being manipulated this way, and to see her wasting such a debilitating emotion on something that did not happen.
This morning, I shot off a page link to the Internet Movie Data Base, detailing the Hollywood woman's long list of credits, her long life, her awards, her prestigious guild and union posts, her accomplished partner and their open relationship.
Maybe it is because I am born under the sign of Cancer. We Cancerians are comfortable with the past, and fascinated by history.
That's why if I were a 25-year-old Cancer surrounded by people trying to manipulate my emotions to make me feel only anger where I should feel pride and hope - well, I'd Google first and get mad later.
If at all.