Controversial Talk with Chloe of the Girlie Girl Newsletter

Chloe, part of your image is that you seem rather opinionated ~ not a complaint, at SK, we all are ;) Yet you seem more positive than negative... What does drive you to a fantastic rant?

Injustice - I will get bloody if I have to. Elie Weisel said "neutrality often favors the oppressors." I think we need to get dirty - get our hands dirty - to make a difference. Even if that means shocking or offending people. Animal rights, queer rights, and feminism are things I'm hyper passionate about. I'm also a Zionist - which is a difficult thing to admit with the political climate in the liberal community right now.. but I am. I believe in Israel and the Jewish peoples right to one teensy little state of their own after all they have been through. I'm also the Granddaughter of Holocaust survivors - so I'm sure that shapes my viewpoint greatly.

Maybe it's because I grew up privileged - around so many people who were such wasters and so entitled. My family kicked me out of the clan when I came out at 18 and I left their world (i.e. my comfort zone) for the next 10 years. I grew up Orthodox Jewish - so being queer did not fit in that realm. I guess I fight for any underdog cuz I've always been an underdog in different ways. Even know - having had to re- come out as bisexual after being exclusively lesbian for 10 years was a difficult journey.

As far as the animal activism thing -- my maternal instincts started kicking in at 18 when I was on my own - so I adopted a dog with my first girlfriend. I guess I didn't know what an overpopulation problem we have in our Country - so that's when I got really into rescue work. I can't imagine why anyone would buy an animal when there are SO many babies that need homes and will love you equally to any purebreed. My last serious girlfriend ('may she live a good long life - far, far away from me' as an old Yiddish proverb goes) turned me on to veganism. I had NO idea how bad factory farming was and really what I was eating. A factory releases more carbon monoxide than cars. It also takes more grain to feed one cow than it would to feed a lot of people. Cows have an ability to remember friends after 10 years apart. The food chain is completely based at this point of the overproduction of animals in cruel and inhumane ways. I'd urge any evolved person to look at Peta.org, MeadIsMurder.com, or simply read a number of books on compassionate living. Why hurt an innocent creature to fill your belly - when there are plenty of delicious and filling (not to mention healthier) meals that can fulfill us without killing. I'm on my own path with this - it's a journey towards complete veganism for me.

I'm a survivor - I'm a Jew. So that off the bat makes me want to help any other minorities. We are all human beings - why should one group have more power or rights than any other? It's so rudimentary - but it makes no sense. I really try to be good to my friends - first and foremost. But I always do what I do with a silent nod to the bigger picture - complete equality to LGBT people, animal liberation, and environmental issues.

I should have been in Auschwitz

I should have been in Auschwitz
In the shower, hot and prickly
The faint glow from the outside illuminating the rickety corners of my knees
Like the skeleton I should have been in Auschwitz,
I am a multi-media art piece left with bits of hair and a hipbone dyed fuchsia
My arm is severed and covered in grimy words and half-sung Yiddish songs
and bitten carrots and cloud-like formations made from soft puffed skin.
I am a mane of hair waiting for the wind to blow and the photographer to come dashing
to shoot the lone ghost girl on her flame bed.
Like a mantra filling in the empty corners of a desolate day,
I await the next step or sign telling me to jump the barbed wire and die on my own terms.
In the women's camps, they dreamed of being born in another time.
They dreamed of freedom.
Am I so free now?
Free from faceless intruders? Inappropriate and telling dreams?
I cry for the Anne Frank I should have been, and the Anne Frank who lives inside me.
I cry for stray puppies and my friends born the wrong gender.
Wouldn't it be nice to find a "Final Solution"?
A one-way ticket rather than two layovers and a backache?
A six hour ride rather than two boats and a rope to swing across?
What if I was meant to be born in 1944 and some other woman died instead of me?
What if we can really waste our lives doing the utterly wrong thing? Loving the utterly wrong
person? Dancing the utterly wrong way? Trusting the most unworthy recipients?
Was Anne swept into the mire of her life at birth with her dreams becoming skeletons that
she dragged by her ankles from corner to corner of her attic - never free from their rattling?
I should have been in Dachau
and not nurturing my own patch of serenity in a fat glob of polluted tar called growth
that beats away at the hearts of the Goddesses' prettiest little warriors.

A Bad-ass Jewess

I promise to do a little everyday
to be a Bad-ass Jewess
swinging poetry from my thumbs and seaming together leaves with my toes
I promise to take care of the little girl inside of me
who still needs a lot of attention
and sugar and the occasional red balloon
I promise to reign in my constant eating
Dad says I have `hollow legs'
Can never quite fill me up with enough food
but its harder when you are trying to be vegan and want to stay thin
I promise to take good care of these expensive new Chanel glasses
that my Amex graciously paid for
I will not fall asleep on them, throw them on the floor before bed,
or put them in the endangered path of one of the dogs with whom I share my life.
I promise to find a food that my skinny dog will actually like and fatten her up.
I promise to keep myself (no matter what) in lip gloss, high heels,
and thick books from my independent bookseller.
I promise to fight harder, grab hold of the reigns, use ebay sparingly, buy in bulk, take my b12 vitamins, dance when I want to, sing 80's songs and mean it, reread books of sisters who's souls are caught in between worlds, enjoy my body in its 20's, look forward to the body my 30's will offer me, name my unborn child something spectacular, love hippies - but never actually become one, use stickers, doodle hearts, stay sensitive, cry at blockbusters and indies alike, listen to folk music while I do laundry, and try to forgive my Mother for not being particularly maternal.
If all I can do is write promises. That is a start.