Featurette: F/Stop cafe breeds soulful poetry scene in Fort Collins

I recently had a chance to sit in on a local open mic poetry night, and decided that to best take you there was to have you listen to it.

A web version of the story is below.

It’s Wednesday night at a slow down-town coffee shop, and the place is filled with people. There is a line forming at the register for coffee. It’s the intermission for an open mic poetry night called Musings held weekly at the F-Stop cafe. Local poets have built a culture around here on sharing and writing their own and other’s poetry. Sage Morris-Greene, co-owner and manager of the cafe, co-created the weekly event with North Carolina poet Neal Ray, who used to host. They wanted to create a different sort of poetry night than those around town.

Morris-Greene says she started the night to be a place of expression for people, where they could share pieces they were working and get constructive critique on the process.

“I don’t think there’s any other open mic in town that allows you to work on stuff that you’re unsure about, or that’s unfinished,” said Morris-Greene. “I really wanted to see something more like that.

The name of the night, Musings, was meant to reflect the open, meditative and thoughtful rumination of poetry, of expressing poetry, and most importantly, of performing poetry. It’s set up as an open-mic, with a style of laid-back lounging and discussion.

“[Neal] and I wanted it to be a mode of expression and recreation of one’s work,” said Morris-Greene. “That really starts touching poetry on a deep level.”

She believes, she said, that poetry becomes the vehicle of the way that we see the world, the way that we paint our perspectives to others through words.

Unfortunately, back in April, Ray, the original host, had to go back to North Carolina. Morris-Greene then took over as host. For many of the poets, Ray gave the night a soulful feel, allowing them to open up and really share their artistry, straight from the gut.

Isaac Freitas, a Colorado State Alumnus, is a regular at Musings. He only began performing his poetry in front of people last November, and says that before that, he had never read his work to anyone. Since then, he said his style has changed a bit, because reading and speaking poetry can have two different effects on the way it is perceived.

“Sharing has definitely given me ideas about what else to write, where to get inspiration, who to mock,” he said jokingly.

He likes the comfortable atmosphere of the poetry night, compared with the monthly poetry slams that go on at the Bean Cycle Cafe.

“You can say what you want to say,” he said. “You can do your worst poem, and people may cringe, or roll their eyes or something, but more in a playful way.”

Joe Dominica is another regular, and has been coming to the poetry night since February of this year. The first poem of the night was one he recited by Adrian Mitchell, called To Whom it May Concern.

“The first time I heard that, it just blew me away,” said Dominica. “I don’t know what it was, but it just sent me somewhere.”

Dominica said his poems are more political, even the ones he recites that are not his own, but loves coming to the weekly poetry night to see what’s out there and draw inspiration from other poets.

The place is such a welcoming and open place that after intermission, a couple participants bring their own instruments. Howard Landman, local poet and self-published author, pulls out a guitar and begins to strum away. Dominica and some new-comers discuss meditation and Buddhist philosophy. A regular coffee-house jam session unfolds.

“I just got a drum recently because I was inspired by Neal Ray, the former host, to express myself musically,” Dominica said.

Ray often brought his own percussion instruments and played them when he was up at the mic. Dominica has frequented other poetry nights– particularly the Monday Night Poetry at the Alley Cat Cafe, but says he prefers the way Musings integrates the music into the night, keeping in-tune with it’s soulful flavor.

Landman has been in the Fort Collins poetry scene for about a decade, and despite writing only about ten or 15 new poems, he has translated about 120 of Rainer Maria Rilke’s works. Like Rilke, he believes that a writer must go into his or her own heart, ask themselves why they are writing, and then “be true to that.”

He enjoys performing in front of an audience, as well.

“When it works,” he said, “there’s just really something about performing in front of people and getting the feedback, and knowing that what you’re doing is affecting them.”

Morris-Greene, who has now become the new host, hopes that Musings will contribute to the poetry scene by providing an open place where people can relax.

“[They can] really let their soul-selves, true-selves, their heart-selves… feel heard,” she said.

Northern Colorado Community Reaction to Proposition 8: The Next Steps

It’s the early morning on Tuesday, May 26, and 1,000 people are holding hands. They stand, confident, in front of the California state court house in San Francisco. They are waiting to hear a ruling from the judges inside, who will decide whether or not Proposition 8, the state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional.

The amendment was approved by a 52 percent popular vote in the November 2008 election, and according to a summary prepared by the State Attorney General of California, the amendment officially provided that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized” by the state.

Through whispers and text messages, news of the ruling metastasized through the crowd. Upheld.

California officially became the first state in the nation to rescind same-sex marriage rights. Opponents of the amendment cried out, “shame on you!” to those who were in favor. Though the judges ruled in favor of the popular vote, the marriages that had already been given between July and November of 2008 were to be recognized and not annulled. At least, for some couples, including those in Colorado, there was certainty that their vows still had validity.

GLBT Support Centers in Colo. Face Reality of Decision
“This is a real battle,” said Andy Stoll, director of the Lambda Community Center of Fort Collins, Colorado.

Back in November, the Northern Colorado GLBTQ community, among others, felt the ripple coming out of California.

“I had a lot of folks who had gone to California to get married, and were really frustrated and mobilized around the issue,” Stoll said. This time around, however, the ruling didn’t affect Coloradans as much, being that it was state and not national legislation. He describes the Day of Decision call to action which served to show mobilization around the inequality that is out there, a consequence of the ruling as a necessary reminder for movement and involvement on a national scale.

“I think honestly that it acted as a catalyst for a lot of other folks to get involved,” Stoll said. “In November, people were just so taken aback about the fact that California did this.”

Kyle Pape, a senior Ethnic Studies major at Colorado State University, was out of the country when the amendment was voted in. Pape is self-identified as non-heterosexual.

“[The amendment] hit me personally as a deterrent to my humanity,” said Pape. “I was like, this dehumanization needs be approached… it is just blatant, institutional oppression.”

The Effects of Proposition 8 on the GLBT Community
“It actually serves to contribute to those acts of violence when you have state-sponsored discrimination of those folks,” said Stoll, “because it acts to dehumanize them and make it easier for people to treat them as less than human.”

Dehumanization begins when one side perceives another as threatening to their well-being or traditional values. According the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every human being, regardless of any distinguishing characteristic, is “born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

The United States is sovereign in its own right, but the nation has made strides in working towards, what the Constitution delineates, as “equal protection of the laws” for all US citizens. This was demonstrated in the 1960s as the Civil Rights Act was passed to ensure the inability of employers to discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, religion, or national heritage. Sexual orientation, however, is still an identity characteristic that has not been nationally protected.

“Equal protection of the laws” should amount to the inability to discriminate based on sexual orientation, race, nationality, religion, age, sex, physical ability, age, socio-economic status, education, and gender identification, Pape said. “The way that Proposition 8 is being perceived nationally is very much so tied to an individual sense of dignity within the GLBT community, and that is something very significant because it is a law that’s impacting how we think about ourselves.”

Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back?
“My feelings were that it would set us back 10 years,” said Joe Peterson, CSU student and co-director of Coloradoans For Family Equality. “Never in my wildest dreams would I think of people voting to take away rights.”

Despite this, many in the GLBT community feel that there have been small strides in progress, such as when President Obama officially signed the UN declaration decriminalizing homosexuality.

Before this, the U.S. was the only Western nation that had not signed it, due to Bush era administration fears that it would direct federal government to allow equal protections to people of sexual orientations other than heterosexual under the law. States within the U.S. still have sovereignty in this matter, and the results have been mixed. The Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996, allowed for a loophole in the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the US Constitution, meaning that states were not legally required to recognize same-sex marriages licensed in other states.

How big is this impact? According to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), the DOMA excludes gay and lesbian married couples from about 1,138 federal protections, rights and responsibilities bestowed upon licensed married couples.

In 2006, Colorado voted in its own amendment banning same-sex marriages.

Pape said that despite successes in mobilization, he sees a large amount of frustration and fervor within the movement due to the ruling of Proposition 8.

“People have the lack of ability to enact agency and have meaningful action that impacts the way their life is going,” said Pape. “What we have is this energy that isn’t being released by the people.”

Campaigning Strategies, Marginalization Thought as Influential Factor in Ruling
Between January and May of 2009, Pape researched and wrote a thesis on the effects of Proposition 8 on the GLBT community, including how and why it had passed. A large factor for the lack of success within the GLBT movement was possibly the differences in campaigning between the proponents and opponents of Prop 8, as well as with marginalization within the GLBT community.

What is recognized in the community is that the media campaign that the proponents of the amendment put out played a huge role in the results, partly due to the amount of money able to fund the campaign and the numbers of people that came out to vote.

“The money was all there for the opposition,” Pape said, “and they were very intelligent in that they were reaching out to so many different kinds of people, their information was in 14 different languages, and the GLBT movement’s was only in four.”

Funding is debatable, however.

“There is money on both sides,” said Peterson. He states that in 2006 in Colorado, the pro-Referendum I and the anti-Amendment 48 campaigns outspent their opponents four to one.

The other part of the issue, Pape said, is that the GLBT movement needs to reach out to all those who are suffering in oppression, not just this one marginalized identity. In this case, the church was able to reach out to many different people and, as Pape said, utilize their ideologies to mobilize the proponents of the amendment.

“Churches are really, really fantastic at organizing people,” said Stoll. “They can get a lot of people out there on whatever issue they are on, and we need to be better at countering that and utilizing some of their model… that’s something that we recognize as a strength in their group.”

This goes along the same vein as the Civil Rights Movement, said Pape. “[The church] is a mobilizing force.”

Media Influence and the Public Sphere
Despite the proponents’ heavy campaigning, the public also wasn’t seeing enough of how Proposition 8 was affecting the GLBT community, Peter Durth said. Durth is a Colorado State Alumnus and was the coordinator of TBGLAD, a week of awareness for under-represented and marginalized non-heterosexual populations, for two years at the university.

“Media outlets are so directed to specific audiences,” said Durth. “Anything about Prop 8 is preaching to the choir.”

The public was not getting enough of the images that we needed to see, said Durth. He compared the shortcomings of the GLBT movement’s campaigning to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement. Hear more about what Durth had to say on the issue… (as a warning, the file is large, I’m working on converting it to mp3).

Stoll said that the representation of the issue in mainstream media lies mostly in accord with whose ideology is being perpetrated through which conglomeration, with some main examples being Cable News Network (CNN), and Fox News.

Pape said, though, that it goes deeper than this. He said that the mainstream media’s representation of the GLBT community is not equal on the whole.

“It is in the interest of the media to appeal to the interest and perceptions of the public, which amount to the perpetuation of [fears and stereotypes] being incited to manipulate the public’s attention, and cause them to be afraid,” said Pape.

The Judges’ Decision
On whether or not the media had a significant affect on the California Supreme Court judges’ ruling on Tuesday, Pape can’t conclusively say. He wonders whether, in the context of their jobs, if they made the wrong decision or not in deciding to uphold the wishes of popular vote.

“The way they justify it, it looks like it may now go to a higher court,” said Pape. “If we get a federal ruling on our side, then we would get national change and that would be amazing.”

Peterson disagrees. He said that he is unsure of whether or not the lawyers who are taking the Prop 8 case to federal court has the support of GLBT legal advocates such as Lambda Legal.

“I hope it doesn’t go through the federal court because I do not think we have the precedent,” said Peterson. He said that the Supreme Court tends to be very conservative in how it makes change, and very slow in enacting these sorts of changes.

“What I hope it does is galvanize the community to become more active than we have been,” said Peterson.

The Next Steps for GLBT Equal Rights
Pape believes that the next steps for the GLBT movement are to begin connecting with all oppressed people, and that this will begin to connect the various movements of liberation into a singular fight.

“The GLBT identification is very unique in that it’s the only identity that is marginalized that also transcends all other identities of marginalization,” he said. “Really, we could mobilize very rationally with GLBT issues as one of the forefront leading catalysts connecting all the other fronts.”

Stoll said that the community centers around Colorado have been focusing more on what they can do to provide protections that are similar to those given in licensed marriages, without necessarily calling them marriages or civil union. This includes protections such as visitation and property rights, second parent adoptions, state employees having domestic partner benefits, and non-discrimination protections in the workplace.

“We are focusing… on all the things that happened since 2006 that are really positive, and getting people to understand that and getting them mobilized around it,” said Stoll.

Peterson, however, has been influential in drafting and proposing a new initiative in Colorado that will propose civil unions. After Proposition 8 had passed, he thought it would be the next best step that could be taken after the loss.

“This would be the first time we’d win partnership recognition through the initiative process, rather than going through the courts or legislature,” said Peterson.

“All of the places that have gone through legislature, like Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, they had civil unions first,” he said, “so we believe this is a very good, achievable step forward.”

Only Iowa and Mass., which went through the courts, had no recognition beforehand, he said. Peterson said that a win in Focus on the Family’s home state would speak to the amount of strength the community is still building up.

“That’s what I hope we come away with as a community (from Proposition 8),” said Peterson. “Nothing can be taken for granted, and we must fight for everything we can.”

Where has marriage for lesbians and gays already been legalized?

New Local Youth Group Meeting Thursdays & Other Lambda Center Events

The Lambda Center of Fort Collins, Colo. is holding a new weekly youth group meeting for people ages 18-29. The meeting will be held from 5-7 pm and is located at the Lambda Center, 212 S. Mason St.

The Lambda Center routinely holds youth group and support meetings for the GLBTQA community in Northern Colorado and also has youth drop-in hours Monday through Friday from 3:00-7:00 pm.

The Sixth Annual Pride in the Park week is being held June 4-7 and will be featuring various vendors, community organizations and fun. This event would be a great place to network and gather with the community. It will be held in Fort Collins’ Civic Center Park.

Andy Stoll, executive director of the center since January, said that the event has been getting bigger and bigger every year. He said it started out as a modest community picnic in Rolland Moore Park; after that, the Lambda Center moved it to Library Park to make it more of a Pride-centered event and then about three years ago, moved the celebration to Civic Center Park where it will be this year.

With the Lambda Center, Stoll recognizes many of the obstacles that the GLBT community faces in Fort Collins. Pride in the Park, along with the youth groups and other programs, is about removing those obstacles.

“It’s all about changing that story for folks,” he said. “It’s about making their stories different than mine were.”

Despite the controversial polarity of equal rights for the GLBT community, the Fort Collins community has generally been calm, Stoll said.

“We prepare every year for protestors, and set up an area for them” just in case, Said Stoll, but: “Never have had protestors.”

He said that the community has had proclamations from Fort Collins’ City Council for the past three years that recognize June 6 as Pride in the Park Day, which help in recognizing the diversity that the GLBT community brings to Fort Collins.

“There are families and people that are genuinely contributing to this community that are part of the GLBT community,” Stoll said.

For more information, you can reach the Lambda Center at 970-221-3247.